'.^^   ^giJoQlt 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Arciiive 

in  2007  witii  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


http://www.arcliive.org/details/childbookreprintOOIeegricli 


By  Gerald  Stanley  Lee 


THE  LOST  ART  OF  READING 

Mount  Tom  Edition 
New  Edition  in  Two  Volumes 

I.  The  Child  and  the  Book  : 

A   Manual  for   Parents  and  for   Teachers  in 
Schools  and  Colleges 

II.  The  Lost  Art  of  Reading ; 

or,   The  Man  and  the  Book 


Two  Volumes,  8vo.     Sold  separately.     Each,  net. 


G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 

New  York  Londok 


Mount  Tom  Edition 


The  Child  and  The  Book 

(Reprinted  from  "  The  Lost  Art  of  Reading  "  ) 

A  Manual  for  Parents,  and  for  Teachers 
in  Schools  and  Colleges 


By 

Gerald  Stanley  Lee 

Anthorof  "  The   Lo«t   Art  of  Reading,"  "  The  Shadow  Christ,"  and  "  The 
Voice  of  the  Machines,"  etc. 


G.  P.  Putnam's  Sons 

New   York  and    London 

Zbc  ItnicRcrbocRcr  press 

1907 


'»  •  • 


Copyright,  iqo2 

BY 

GERALD  STANLEY  LEE 


•  *  »v  •  .  •  • 


To 

JENNETTE  LEE 


271025 


A  Note 


IT  has  been  thought  best  to  accommodate  a 
special  demand   for  certain  parts  of  Th:^ 
lyOST  Art  of  Reading  by  dividing  the 
book  and  publishing  an  edition  in  two  vol- 
umes, to  be  called  the  Mount  Tom  edition. 

The  first  volume  is  called  The  Chii,d  and 
The  Book,  and  deals  with  the  practical  prob- 
lems of  reading,  among  children  and  young 
people,  and  in  schools  and  colleges,  and  the 
second  is  called  The  Lost  Art  of  Reading, 
or.  The  Man  and  The  Book,  and  deals  with 
the  more  personal  and  private  experiences  of 
the  adult  reader  in  his  struggle  to  remain 
intelligent  in  modem  life. 

Gerald  Stani^ey  Lee. 

Mount  Tom, 

Northampton  Massachusetts, 
September^  igo6. 


H  -note 


Vll 


Contents 


PART   ONE 

INTERFERENCES  WITH  THE 
READING  HABIT 


PAGE 

3 


THE  DISGRACE  OF  THE  IMAGINATION 
I — On  Wondering  Why  One  Was  Bom 
II — ^The  Top  of  the  Bureau  Principle     .         .       lo 

THE    UNPOPULARITY    OF  THE     FIRST 
PERSON  SINGULAR 

I — The  First  Person  a  Necessary  Bvil  .         .  i8 

II — The  Art  of  Being  Anonymous  .  ,  25 

III — Egoism  and  Society         ....  32 

IV— i  +  I  =  We 35 

V — The  Autobiography  of  Beauty  .         .  40 


Ifnterfer- 

cncc0  witb 

tbe  reaftinfl 

babft 


THE  HABIT    OF   NOT    LETTING    ONE»S 
SELF  GO 
I — ^The  Country  Boy  in  Literature         .         .      45 
II — The  Subconscious  Self  .         .         .         .      5i 

III — ^The  Organic  Principle  of  Inspiration        .       5^ 


viii 

Contents 

THE  HABIT  OF  ANALYSIS 

fnterfcr* 

I — If  Shakespeare  Came  to  Chicago     . 

PAGE 

.      6i 

cncce  vcitb 

tbe  ceaMng 

babit 

II — ^Analysis  Analyzed 
LITERARY  DRILL  IN  COLLEGE 

•      72 

I — Seeds  and  Blossoms 

80 

II — ^Private  Road  :  Dangerous 

86 

III — ^The  Organs  of  Literature 

95 

IV — Entrance  Examinations  in  Joy 

100 

V — Natural  Selection  in  Theory    . 

107 

VI— Natural  Selection  in  Practice  . 

III 

VII — The  Emancipation  of  the  Teacher   . 

118 

VIII— The  Test  of  Culture 

122 

IX — Summary 

124 

X— A  Note 

130 

PART  TWO 

POSSIBILITIES 

po80{bil{« 
tice 

I — ^The  Issue 

II — ^The  First  Selection 

.     135 

.     138 

III — Conveniences          .... 

•     139 

IV— The  Charter  of  Possibility 

.     146 

V — The  Great  Game     .... 

.     149 

VI — Outward  Bound 

.     155 

Part  I 

•ffnterterences  witb  tbe  IReaDina 
Dabit 


)  t 


3 

The    First    Interference: 

The  Disgrace  of  the 

Imagination 

TKnondera 

®ne  TRnas 
3Born 

I 

Qn  dUlonberind  Wh^  ®ne  Maa 
Born 

nPHE  real  trouble  with  most  of  the  attempts 
1      that  teachers  and  parents  make,  to  teach 
children  a  vital  relation  to  books,  is  that  they 
do  not  believe  in  the  books  and  that  they  do 
not  believe  in  the  children. 

It  is  almost  impossible  to  find  a  child  who, 
in  one  direction  or  another,  the  first  few  years 
of  his  life,  is  not  creative.     It  is  almost  impos- 
sible to  find  a  parent  or  a  teacher  who  does  not 
discourage  this  creativeness.     The  discourage- 
ment begins  in  a  small  way,  at  first,  in  the 

XLbc  CbilD  arib  XTbe  Booft 


On 

TRaonbers 

ing  TlClby 

0ne  TIQlas 

£orn 


average  family,  but  as  the  more  creative  a 
child  becomes  the  more  inconvenient  he  is,  as 
a  general  rule,  every  time  a  boy  is  caught 
being  creative,  something  has  to  be  done  to  him 
about  it. 

It  is  a  part  of  the  nature  of  creativeness  that 
it  involves  being  creative  a  large  part  of  the 
time  in  the  wrong  direction.  Half-proud  and 
half-stupefied  parents,  failing  to  see  that  the 
mischief  in  a  boy  is  the  entire  basis  of  his  edu- 
cation, the  mainspring  of  his  life,  not  being 
able  to  break  the  mainspring  themselves,  fre- 
quently hire  teachers  to  help  them.  The 
teacher  who  can  break  a  mainspring  first  and 
keep  it  from  getting  mended,  is  often  the  most 
esteemed  in  the  community.  Those  who  have 
broken  the  most,  "  secure  results."  The  spec- 
tacle of  the  mechanical,  barren,  conventional 
society  so  common  in  the  present  day,  to  all 
who  love  their  kind  is  a  sign  there  is  no  with- 
standing. It  is  a  spectacle  we  can  only  stand 
and  watch  —  some  of  us, —  the  huge,  dreary 
kinetoscope  of  it,  grinding  its  cogs  and  wheels, 
and  swinging  its  weary  faces  past  our  eyes. 
The  most  common  sight  in  it  and  the  one  that 
hurts  the  hardest,  is  the  boy  who  could  be 
made  into  a  man  out  of  the  parts  of  him  that 
his  parents  and  teachers  are  trying  to  throw 
away.  The  faults  of  the  average  child,  as 
things  are  going  just  now,  would  be  the  making 
of  him,  if  he  could  be  placed  in  seeing  hands. 
It  may  not  be  possible  to  educate  a  boy  by 


Qn  Mont)ering  Wib^  ©ne  Wias  Born 


using  what  has  been  left  out  of  him,  but  it  is 
more  than  possible  to  begin  his  education  by 
using  what  ought  to  have  been  left  out  of  him. 
So  long  as  parents  and  teachers  are  either 
too  dull  or  too  busy  to  experiment  with  mis- 
chief, to  be  willing  to  pay  for  a  child's  original- 
ity what  originality  costs,  only  the  most  hope- 
less children  can  be  expected  to  amount  to 
anything.  If  we  fail  to  see  that  originality  is 
worth  paying  for,  that  the  risk  involved  in  a 
child's  not  being  creative  is  infinitely  more 
serious  than  the  risk  involved  in  his  being 
creative  in  the  wrong  direction,  there  is  little 
either  for  us  or  for  our  children  to  hope  for,  as 
the  years  go  on,  except  to  grow  duller  together. 
We  do  not  like  this  growing  duller  together 
very  well,  perhaps,  but  we  have  the  feeling  at 
least  that  we  have  been  educated,  and  when 
our  children  become  at  last  as  little  interested 
in  the  workings  of  their  minds,  as  parents  and 
teachers  are  in  theirs,  we  have  the  feeling  that 
they  also  have  been  educated.  We  are  not  un- 
willing to  admit,  in  a  somewhat  useless,  kindly, 
generalising  fashion,  that  vital  and  beautiful 
children  delight  in  things,  in  proportion  as 
they  discover  them,  or  are  allowed  to  make 
them  up,  but  we  do  not  propose  in  the  mean- 
time to  have  our  own  children  any  more  vital 
and  beautiful  than  we  can  help.  In  four  or 
fiv^  years  they  discover  that  a  home  is  a  place 
where  the  more  one  thinks  of  things,  the  more 
unhappy  he  is.     In  four  or  five  years  more 


On 
TRIlonderai 

One  TKAas 
3Born 


Ubc  CbilD  ant>  Zbc  IBooft 


On 

WLonteva 

ina  XQlbs 

One  WLae 

3Born 


they  learn  that  a  school  is  a  place  where 
children  are  expected  not  to  use  their  brains 
while  they  are  being  cultivated.  As  long  as 
he  is  at  his  mother's  breast  the  typical  Ameri- 
can child  finds  that  he  is  admired  for  thinking 
of  things.  When  he  runs  around  the  house 
he  finds  gradually  that  he  is  admired  very 
much  less  for  thinking  of  things.  At  school 
he  is  disciplined  for  it.  In  a  library,  if  he  has 
an  uncommonly  active  mind,  and  takes  the 
liberty  of  being  as  alive  there,  as  he  is  out- 
doors, if  he  roams  through  the  books,  vaults 
over  their  fences,  climbs  up  their  mountains, 
and  eats  of  their  fruit,  and  dreams  by  their 
streams,  or  is  caught  camping  out  in  their 
woods,  he  is  made  an  example  of.  He  is 
treated  as  a  tramp  and  an  idler,  and  if  he  can- 
not be  held  down  with  a  dictionary  he  is  looked 
upon  as  not  worth  educating.  If  his  parents 
decide  he  shall  be  educated  anyway,  dead  or 
alive,  or  in  spite  of  his  being  alive,  the  more 
he  is  educated  the  more  he  wonders  why  he 
was  born  and  the  more  his  teachers  from 
behind  their  dictionaries,  and  the  other  boys 
from  underneath  their  dictionaries,  wonder 
why  he  was  born.  While  it  may  be  a  general 
principle  that  the  longer  a  boy  wonders  why 
he  was  born  in  conditions  like  these,  and  the 
longer  his  teachers  and  parents  wonder,  the 
more  there  is  of  him,  it  may  be  observed  that 
a  general  principle  is  not  of  very  much  comfort 
to  the  boy  while  the  process  of  wondering  is 


Qn  TRUonbettnd  Mb^  (^ne  Mas  J3orn 


going  on.  There  seems  to  be  no  escape  from 
the  process,  and  if,  while  he  is  being  educated, 
he  is  not  allowed  to  use  himself,  he  can  hardly 
be  blamed  for  spending  a  good  deal  of  his  time 
in  wondering  why  he  is  not  some  one  else.  In 
a  half-seeing,  half-blinded  fashion  he  struggles 
on.  If  he  is  obstinate  enough,  he  manages  to 
struggle  through  with  his  eyes  shut.  Some- 
times he  belongs  to  a  higher  kind,  and  opens 
his  eyes  and  struggles. 

With  the  average  boy  the  struggle  with  the 
School  and  the  Church  is  less  vigorous  than 
the  struggle  at  home.  It  is  more  hopeless. 
A  mother  is  a  comparatively  simple  affair. 
One  can  either  manage  a  mother  or  be  man- 
aged. It  is  merely  a  matter  of  time.  It  is 
soon  settled.  There  is  something  there.  She 
is  not  boundless,  intangible.  The  School  and 
the  Church  are  different.  With  the  first  fresh 
breaths  of  the  world  tingling  in  him,  the  youth 
stands  before  them.  They  are  entirely  new  to 
him.  They  are  huge,  immeasurable,  unac- 
countable. They  loom  over  him — a  part  of 
the  structure  of  the  universe  itself.  A  mother 
can  meet  one  in  a  door.  The  problem  is  con- 
centrated. The  Church  stretches  beyond  the 
sunrise.  The  School  is  part  of  the  horizon  of 
the  earth,  and  what  after  all  is  his  own  life  and 
who  is  he  that  he  should  take  account  of  it  ? 
Out  of  space — out  of  time — out  of  history  they 
come  to  him  —  the  Church  and  the  School. 
They  are  the  assembling  of  all  mankind  around 


On 
WLoribcva 

Qnc  XXHm 
3Born 


XTbe  (Tbtlb  anD  UDc  IBooR 


WLoribeta 

ing  TRnbs 

®ne  XKIla0 

Corn 


his  soul.  Each  with  its  Cone  of  Ether,  its 
desire  to  control  the  breath  of  his  life,  its 
determination  to  do  his  breathing  for  him,  to 
push  the  Cone  down  over  him,  looms  above 
him  and  above  all  in  sight,  before  he  speaks — 
before  he  is  able  to  speak. 

It  is  soon  over.  He  lies  passive  and  insen- 
sible at  last, — as  convenient  as  though  he  were 
dead,  and  the  Church  and  the  School  operate 
upon  him.  They  remove  as  many  of  his 
natural  organs  as  they  can,  put  in  Presbyterian 
ones  perhaps,  or  School-Board  ones  instead. 
Those  that  cannot  be  removed  are  numbed. 
When  the  time  is  fulfilled  and  the  youth  is 
cured  of  enough  life  at  last  to  like  living  with 
the  dead,  and  when  it  is  thought  he  is  enough 
like  every  one  else  to  do,  he  is  given  his  degree 
and  sewed  up. 

After  the  sewing  up  his  history  is  better 
imagined  than  described.  Not  being  interest- 
ing to  himself,  he  is  not  apt  to  be  very  in- 
teresting to  any  one  else,  and  because  of  his 
lack  of  interest  in  himself  he  is  called  the 
average  man.* 

*  A  Typical  Case :  "  The  brain  was  cut  away  neatly 
and  dressed.  A  healthy  yearling  calf  was  tied  down, 
her  skull  cut  away,  and  a  lobe  of  brain  removed  and 
fitted  into  the  cavity  in  Iv's  head.  The  wound  was 
dressed  and  trephined,  and  the  results  awaited.  The 
calf's  head  was  fixed  up  with  half  a  brain  in  it.  Both 
the  man  and  the  calf  have  progressed  satisfactorily, 
and  the  man  is  nearly  as  well  as  before  the  operation." 
— Daily  Paper. 


Qn  Mon^erina  Mb^  (^ne  Mas  JBorn 


The  main  distinction  of  every  greater  or  more 
extraordinary  book  is  that  it  has  been  written 
by  an  extraordinary  man — a  natural  or  wild 
man,  a  man  of  genius,  who  has  never  been 
operated  on.  The  main  distinction  of  the  man 
of  talent  is  that  he  has  somehow  managed  to 
escape  a  complete  operation.  It  is  a  matter  of 
common  observation  in  reading  biography  that 
in  proportion  as  men  have  had  lasting  power 
in  the  world  there  has  been  something  irregu- 
lar in  their  education.  These  irregularities, 
whether  they  happen  to  be  due  to  overwhelm- 
ing circumstance  or  to  overwhelming  tempera- 
ment, seem  to  sum  themselves  up  in  one 
fundamental  and  comprehensive  irregularity 
that  penetrates  them  all — namely,  every  power- 
ful mind,  in  proportion  to  its  power,  either  in 
school  or  out  of  it  or  in  spite  of  it,  has  educated 
itself.  The  ability  that  many  men  have  used 
to  avoid  being  educated  is  exactly  the  same 
ability  they  have  used  afterward  to  move  the 
world  with.  In  proportion  as  they  have  moved 
the  world,  they  are  found  to  have  kept  the  lead 
in  their  education  from  their  earliest  years,  to 
have  had  a  habit  of  initiative  as  well  as  hospi- 
tality, to  have  maintained  a  creative,  selective, 
active  attitude  toward  all  persons  and  toward 
all  books  that  have  been  brought  within  range 
of  their  lives. 


TKnonbers 
JSorn 


lO 


Ube  Cbilt)  anb  XTbe  Booh 


II 


UbeUop 
of  tbe 
:iSureau 

piinciplc 


^be  Zop  of  tbe  Bureau  principle 

The  experience  of  being  robbed  of  a  story 
we  are  about  to  read,  by  the  good  friend  who 
cannot  help  telling  how  it  comes  out,  is  an 
occasional  experience  in  the  lives  of  older 
people,  but  it  sums  up  the  main  sensation  of 
life  in  the  career  of  a  child.  The  whole  exist- 
ence of  a  boy  may  be  said  to  be  a  daily — 
almost  hourly— struggle  to  escape  from  being 
told  things. 

It  has  been  found  that  the  best  way  to  em- 
phasise a  fact  in  the  mind  of  a  bright  boy  is  to 
discover  some  way  of  not  saying  anything 
about  it.  And  this  is  not  because  human 
nature  is  obstinate,  but  because  facts  have  been 
intended  from  the  beginning  of  the  world  to 
speak  for  themselves,  and  to  speak  better  than 
any  one  can  speak  for  them.  When  a  fact 
speaks,  God  speaks.  Considering  the  way 
that  most  persons  who  are  talking  about  the 
truth  see  fit  to  rush  in  and  interrupt  Him,  the 
wonder  is  not  that  children  grow  less  and  less 
interested  in  truth  as  they  grow  older,  but  that 
they  are  interested  in  truth  at  all — even  lies 
about  the  truth. 

The  real  trouble  with  most  men  and  women 
as  parents  is,  that  they  have  had  to  begin  life 
with  parents  of  their  own.  When  the  child's 
first  memory  of  God  is  a  father  or  mother  in- 


XTbe  ITop  ot  tbe  JBureau  principle 


II 


terrupting  Him,  he  is  apt  to  be  under  the  im- 
pression, when  he  grows  up,  that  God  can  only 
be  introduced  to  his  own  children  by  never 
being  allowed  to  get  a  word  in.  If  we  as 
much  as  see  a  Fact  coming  toward  a  child — 
most  of  us— we  either  run  out  where  the  child 
is,  and  bring  him  into  the  house  and  cry  over 
him,  or  we  rush  to  his  side  and  look  anxious 
and  stand  in  front  of  the  Fact,  and  talk  to  him 
about  it. 

And  yet  it  is  doubtful  if  there  has  ever  been 
a  boy  as  yet  worth  mentioning,  who  did  not 
wish  we  would  stand  a  little  more  one  side — 
let  him  have  it  out  with  things.  He  is  very 
weary — if  he  really  amounts  to  anything — of 
having  everything  about  him  prepared  for 
him.  There  has  never  been  a  live  boy  who 
would  not  throw  a  store-plaything  away  in  two 
or  three  hours  for  a  comparatively  imperfect 
plaything  he  had  made  himself.  He  is  equally 
indifferent  to  a  store  Fact,  and  a  boy  who  does 
not  see  through  a  store-God,  or  a  store-book, 
or  a  store-education  sooner  than  ninety- nine 
parents  out  of  a  hundred  and  sooner  than  most 
synods,  is  not  worth  bringing  up. 

No  just  or  comprehensive  principle  can  be 
found  to  govern  the  reading  of  books  that 
cannot  be  made  to  apply,  by  one  who  really 
believes  it  (though  in  varying  degrees),  to  the 
genius  and  to  the  dolt.  It  is  a  matter  of  his- 
tory that  a  boy  of  fine  creative  powers  can 
only  be  taught  a  true  relation  to  books  through 


"Cbe  Hop 
of  tbe 
3Bureau 

principle 


12 


ZTbe  Cbil^  an&  XCbe  JSooft 


trbe  Uop 

oftbe 

£ureau 

Principle 


an  appeal  to  his  own  discoveries;  but  what  is 
being  especially  contended  for,  and  what  most 
needs  to  be  emphasised  in  current  education, 
is  the  fact  that  the  boy  of  ordinary  creative 
powers  can  only  be  taught  to  read  in  the  same 
way — by  a  slower,  broader,  and  more  patient 
appeal  to  his  own  discoveries.  The  boy  of  no 
creative  powers  whatever,  if  he  is  ever  born, 
should  not  be  taught  to  read  at  all.  Creation 
is  the  essence  of  knowing,  and  teaching  him 
to  read  merely  teaches  him  more  ways  of  not 
knowing.  It  gives  him  a  wider  range  of  places 
to  be  a  nobody  in — takes  away  his  last  oppor- 
tunity for  thinking  of  anything — that  is,  get- 
ting the  meaning  of  anything  for  himself.  If 
a  man's  heart  does  not  beat  for  him,  why  sub- 
stitute a  hot- water  bottle?  The  less  a  mind 
is  able  to  do,  the  less  it  can  afford  to  have  any- 
thing done  for  it.  It  will  be  a  great  day  for 
education  when  we  all  have  learned  that  the 
genius  and  the  dolt  can  only  be  educated — at 
different  rates  of  speed — in  exactly  the  same 
way.  The  trouble  with  our  education  now  is, 
that  many  of  us  do  not  see  that  a  boy  who  has 
been  presented  with  an  imitation  brain  is  a 
deal  worse  off  than  a  boy  who,  in  spite  of  his 
teachers,  has  managed  to  save  his  real  one, 
and  has  not  used  it  yet. 

It  is  dangerous  to  give  a  program  for  a  prin- 
ciple to  those  who  do  not  believe  in  the 
principle,  and  who  do  not  believe  in  it  instinct- 
ively, but  if  a  program  were  to  be  given  it 


Zbc  XTop  ot  tbe  JSurcau  iprtnctplc 


13 


would  be  something  like  this:  It  would  assume 
that  the  best  way  to  do  with  an  uncreative 
mind  is  to  put  the  owner  of  it  where  his  mind 
will  be  obliged  to  create. 

First.  Decide  what  the  owner  of  the  mind 
most  wants  in  the  world. 

Second.  Put  this  thing,  whatever  it  may  be, 
where  the  owner  of  the  mind  cannot  get  it 
unless  he  uses  his  mind.  Take  pains  to  put 
it  where  he  can  get  it,  if  he  does  use  his  mind. 

Third.  Lure  him  on.     It  is  education. 

If  this  principle  is  properly  applied  to  books, 
there  is  not  a  human  being  living  on  the  earth 
who  will  not  find  himself  capable  of  reading 
books — as  far  as  he  goes — with  his  whole  mind 
and  his  whole  body.  He  will  read  a  printed 
page  as  eagerly  as  he  lives,  and  he  will  read  it 
in  exactly  the  same  way  that  he  lives — with 
his  imagination.  A  boy  lives  with  his  imagi- 
nation every  hour  of  his  life — except  in  school. 
The  moment  he  discovers,  or  is  allowed  to 
discover,  that  reading  a  book  and  living  a  day 
are  very  much  alike,  that  they  are  both  parts 
of  the  same  act,  and  that  they  are  both  prop- 
erly done  in  the  same  way,  he  will  drink  up 
knowledge  as  Job  did  scorning,  like  water. 

But  it  is  objected  that  many  children  are 
entirely  imitative,  and  that  the  imagination 
cannot  be  appealed  to  with  them  and  that  they 
cut  themselves  off  from  creativeness  at  every 
point. 

While  it  is  inevitable  in  the  nature  of  things 


Ube  Uop 

of  tbe 

JSureau 

|)rinciple 


14 


TLbc  CbilD  anb  Ube  Booft 


Ube  'Cop 

oftbe 

liSureau 

principle 


that  many  children  should  be  largely  imitative, 
there  is  not  a  child  that  does  not  do  some  of 
his  imitating  in  a  creative  way,  give  the  hint 
to  his  teachers  even  in  his  imitations,  of  where 
his  creativeness  would  come  if  it  were  allowed 
to.  His  very  blunders  in  imitating,  point  to 
desires  that  would  make  him  creative  of  them- 
selves, if  followed  up.  Some  children  have 
many  desires  in  behalf  of  which  they  become 
creative.  Others  are  creative  only  in  behalf 
of  a  few.  But  there  is  always  a  single  desire 
in  a  child's  nature  through  which  his  creative- 
ness can  be  called  out. 

A  boy  learns  to  live,  to  command  his  body, 
through  the  desires  which  make  him  creative 
with  it — hunger,  and  movement,  and  sleep — 
desires  the  very  vegetables  are  stirred  with, 
and  the  boy  who  does  not  find  himself  respond- 
ing to  them,  who  can  help  responding  to  them, 
does  not  exist.  There  may  be  times  when  a 
boy  has  no  desire  to  fill  himself  with  food,  and 
when  he  has  no  desire  to  think,  but  if  he  is 
kept  hungry  he  is  soon  found  doing  both — 
thinking  things  into  his  stomach.  A  stomach, 
in  the  average  boy,  will  all  but  take  the  part 
of  a  brain  itself,  for  the  time  being,  to  avoid 
being  empty.  If  a  human  being  is  alive  at  all, 
there  is  always  at  least  one  desire  he  can  be 
educated  with,  prodded  into  creativeness,  until 
he  learns  the  habit  and  the  pleasure  of  it. 
The  best  qualification  for  a  nurse  for  a  child 
whose  creativeness  turns  on  his  stomach,  is  a 


Zbc  XTop  ot  tbe  Bureau  ©rtnctple 


15 


natural  gift  for  keeping  food  on  the  tops  of 
bureaus  and  shelves  just  out  of  reach.  The 
best  qualification  for  a  teacher  is  infinite  con- 
trivance in  high  bureaus.  The  applying  of 
the  Top  of  the  High  Bureau  to  all  knowledge 
and  to  all  books  is  what  true  education  is  for. 

It  is  generally  considered  a  dangerous  thing 
to  do,  to  turn  a  child  loose  in  a  library.  It 
might  fairly  be  called  a  dangerous  thing  to  do 
if  it  were  not  much  more  dangerous  not  to. 
The  same  forces  that  wrought  themselves  into 
the  books  when  they  were  being  made  can  be 
trusted  to  gather  and  play  across  them  on  the 
shelves.  These  forces  are  the  self-propelling 
and  self-healing  forces  of  the  creative  mood. 
The  creative  mood  protects  the  books,  and  it 
protects  all  who  come  near  the  books.  It  pro- 
tects from  the  inside.  It  toughens  and  makes 
supple.  Parents  who  cannot  trust  a  boy  to 
face  the  weather  in  a  library  should  never  let 
him  outdoors. 

Trusting  a  boy  to  the  weather  in  a  library 
may  have  its  momentary  embarrassments,  but 
it  is  immeasurably  the  shortest  and  most  nat- 
ural way  to  bring  him  into  a  vital  connection 
with  books.  The  first  condition  of  a  vital  con- 
nection with  books  is  that  he  shall  make  the 
connection  for  himself.  The  relation  will  be 
vital  in  proportion  as  he  makes  it  himself. 

The  fact  that  he  will  begin  to  use  his  five 
reading  senses  by  trying  to  connect  in  the 
wrong  way,  or  by  connecting  with  the  wrong 


Ube  Uop 

ottbc 

bureau 

(Principle 


i6 


Ube  Cbilb  ant>  Ube  Booft 


Ube  Uop 

oftbe 

3Bureau 

principle 


books  or  parts  of  books,  is  a  reason,  not  for 
action  on  the  part  of  parents  and  teachers,  but 
for  inspired  waiting.  As  a  vital  relation  to 
books  is  the  most  immeasurable  outfit  for  living 
and  the  most  perfect  protection  against  the 
dangers  of  life,  a  boy  can  have,  the  one  point 
to  be  borne  in  mind  is  not  the  book  but  the 
boy — the  instinct  of  curiosity  in  the  boy. 

A  boy  who  has  all  his  good  discoveries  in 
books  made  for  him — spoiled  for  him,  if  he  has 
any  good  material  in  him  —  will  proceed  to 
make  bad  ones.  The  vices  would  be  nearly  as 
safe  from  interference  as  the  virtues,  if  they 
were  faithfully  cultivated  in  Sunday-schools  or 
by  average  teachers  in  day-schools.  Sin  itself 
is  uninteresting  when  one  knows  all  about  it. 
The  interest  of  the  average  young  man  in 
many  a  more  important  sin  to-day  is  only  kept 
up  by  the  fact  that  no  one  stands  by  with  a 
book  teaching  him  how  to  do  it.  Whatever 
the  expression  "original  sin  "  may  have  meant 
in  the  first  place,  it  means  now  that  we  are  full 
of  original  sin  because  we  are  not  given  a 
chance  to  be  original  in  anything  else.  A 
virtue  may  be  defined  as  an  act  so  good  that  a 
religiously  trained  youth  cannot  possibly  learn 
anything  more  about  it.  A  classic  is  a  pleas- 
ure hurried  into  a  responsibility,  a  book  read 
by  every  man  before  he  has  anything  to  read 
it  with.  A  classical  author  is  a  man  who,  if 
he  could  look  ahead — could  see  the  genera- 
tions   standing   in   rows    to    read    his  book. 


Zbc  XTop  ot  tbe  JBureau  iprtnctple 


17 


toeing  the  line  to  love  it — would  not  read  it 
himself. 

Any  training  in  the  use  of  books  that  does 
not  base  its  whole  method  of  rousing  the  in- 
stinct of  curiosity,  and  keeping  it  aroused,  is  a 
wholesale  slaughter,  not  only  of  the  minds  that 
might  live  in  the  books,  but  of  the  books  them- 
selves. To  ignore  the  central  curiosity  of  a 
child's  life,  his  natural  power  of  self-discovery 
in  books,  is  to  dispense  with  the  force  of  gravity 
in  books,  instead  of  taking  advantage  of  it. 


TCbe  Uop 

of  tbe 

Xuceau 

principle 


i8 


The  Second  Interference: 

The  Unpopularity  of  the 

First  Person  Singular 


Ube  fivet 

person  a 

'necessary 


JLhc  3fir0t  pereon  a  Becesaar?  CvU 

GREAT  emphasis  is  being  laid  at  the 
present  time  upon  the  tools  that  readers 
ought  to  have  to  do  their  reading  with.  We 
seem  to  be  living  in  a  reference-book  age. 
Whatever  else  may  be  claimed  for  our  own 
special  generation  it  stands  out  as  having  one 
inspiration  that  is  quite  its  own — the  inspira- 
tion of  conveniences.  That  these  conveniences 
have  their  place,  that  one  ought  to  have  the 
best  of  them  there  can  be  no  doubt,  but  it  is 
very  important  to  bear  in  mind,  particularly  in 
the  present  public  mood,  that  if  one  cannot 


XTbe  ffirst  person  a  laeceBsarp  i£\>tl 


19 


have  all  of  these  conveniences,  or  even  the  best 
of  them,  the  one  absolutely  necessary  reference 
book  in  reading  the  masters  of  literature  is  one 
that  every  man  has. 

It  is  something  of  a  commonplace — a  rather 
modest  volume  with  most  of  us,  summed  up  on 
a  tombstone  generally,  easily  enough,  but  we 
are  bound  to  believe  after  all  is  said  and  done 
that  the  great  masterpiece  among  reference 
books,  for  every  man, — the  one  originally  in- 
tended by  the  Creator  for  every  man  to  use, — 
is  the  reference  book  of  his  own  life.  We  be- 
lieve that  the  one  direct  and  necessary  thing 
for  a  man  to  do,  if  he  is  going  to  be  a  good 
reader,  is  to  make  this  reference  book — his 
own  private  edition  of  it — as  large  and  com- 
plete as  possible.  Everything  refers  to  it, 
whatever  his  reading  is.  Shakespeare  and  the 
New  York  World,  Homer  and  Harper's  Bazar, 
Victor  Hugo  and  The  Foruniy  Babyhood  and 
the  Bible  all  refer  to  it, — are  all  alike  in  making 
their  references  (when  they  are  really  looked 
up)  to  private  editions.  Other  editions  do  not 
work.  In  proportion  as  they  are  powerful  in 
modern  life,  all  the  books  and  papers  that  we 
have  are  engaged  in  the  business  of  going 
about  the  world  discovering  people  to  them- 
selves, unroofing  first  person  singulars  in  it, 
getting  people  to  use  their  own  reference  books 
on  all  life.  Literature  is  a  kind  of  vast  inter- 
national industry  of  comparing  life.  We  read 
to  look  up  references  in  our  own  souls.     The 


Ube  jpirst 

person  a 

mecessar^ 

£vil 


20 


Ube  CbilD  anb  tTbe  JSooft 


Ube  ^irat 
|>er0on  a 
Vlecessart? 


immortality  of  Homer  and  the  circulation  of 
the  Ladies^  Home  Journal  both  conform  to  this 
fact,  and  it  is  equally  the  secret  of  the  last 
page  of  Harper's  Bazar  and  of  Hamlet  and  of 
the  grave  and  monthly  lunge  of  The  Forum  at 
passing  events.  The  difference  of  appeal  may 
be  as  wide  as  the  east  and  the  west,  but  the 
east  and  the  west  are  in  human  nature  and  not 
in  the  nature  of  the  appeal.  The  larger  selves 
look  themselves  up  in  the  greater  writers  and 
the  smaller  selves  spell  themselves  out  in  the 
smaller  ones.  It  is  here  we  all  behold  as  in 
some  vast  reflection  or  mirage  of  the  reading 
world  our  own  souls  crowding  and  jostling, 
little  and  great,  against  the  walls  of  their 
years,  seeking  to  be  let  out,  to  look  out,  to  look 
over,  to  look  up — that  they  may  find  their  pos- 
sible selves. 

When  men  are  allowed  to  follow  what  might 
be  called  the  forces  of  nature  in  the  reading 
world  they  are  seen  to  read : 

I  St.  About  themselves. 

2nd.  About  people  they  know. 

3rd.  About  people  they  want  to  know. 

4th.  God. 

Next  to  their  interest  in  persons  is  their  in- 
terest in  things: 

I  St.  Things  that  they  have  themselves. 

2nd.  Things  that  people  they  know,  have. 

3rd.  Things  they  want  to  have. 

4th.  Things  they  ought  to  want  to  have. 

5th.  Other  things. 


Zbc  ffirst  person  a  IRecessarp  Bvil 


21 


6th.  The  universe — things  God  has. 

7th.  God. 

A  scale  like  this  may  not  be  very  compli- 
mentary to  human  nature.  Some  of  us  feel 
that  it  is  appropriate  and  possibly  a  little  re- 
ligious to  think  that  it  is  not.  But  the  scale 
is  here.  It  is  mere  psychological-matter-of- 
fact.  It  is  the  way  things  are  made,  and 
while  it  may  not  be  quite  complimentary  to 
human  nature,  it  seems  to  be  more  compli- 
mentary to  God  to  believe,  in  spite  of  appear- 
ances, that  this  scale  from  I  to  God  is  made 
right  and  should  be  used  as  it  stands.  It 
seems  to  have  been  in  general  use  among  our 
more  considerable  men  in  the  world  and  among 
all  our  great  men  and  among  all  who  have 
made  others  great.  They  do  not  seem  to  have 
been  ashamed  of  it.  They  have  climbed  up 
frankly  on  it — most  of  them,  in  full  sight  of  all 
men — from  I  to  God.  They  have  claimed  that 
everybody  (including  themselves)  was  identi- 
fied with  God,  and  they  have  made  people  be- 
lieve it.  It  is  the  few  in  every  generation 
who  have  dared  to  believe  in  this  scale,  and 
who  have  used  it,  who  have  been  the  leaders 
of  the  rest.  The  measure  of  a  man's  being 
seems  to  be  the  swiftness  with  which  his  nature 
runs  from  the  bottom  of  this  scale  to  the  top, 
the  swiftness  with  which  he  identifies  himself, 
says  *  *  I  "  in  all  of  it.  The  measure  of  his  abil- 
ity to  read  on  any  particular  subject  is  the  swift- 
ness with  which  he  runs  the  scale  from  the 


Ube  3f  iret 

person  a 

•Reccgsarg 

£vil 


22 


Zbc  CbilD  auD  XTbe  36ooK 


Ubc  first 

person  a 

Vleceesars 

Svil 


bottom  to  the  top  on  that  subject,  makes  the 
trip  with  his  soul  from  his  own  little  I  to  God. 
When  he  has  mastered  the  subject,  he  makes 
the  run  almost  without  knowing  it,  sees  it  as 
it  is,  t.  e.y  identifies  himself  with  God  on  it. 
The  principle  is  one  which  reaches  under  all 
mastery  in  the  world,  from  the  art  of  prophecy 
even  to  the  art  of  politeness.  The  man  who 
makes  the  trip  on  any  subject  from  the  first 
person  out  through  the  second  person,  to  the 
farthest  bounds  of  the  third  person, — that  is, 
who  identifies  himself  with  all  men's  lives,  is 
called  the  poet  or  seer,  the  master-lover  of  per- 
sons. The  man  who  makes  the  trip  most 
swiftly  from  his  own  things  to  other  men's 
things  and  to  God's  things — the  Universe — is 
called  the  scientist,  the  master-lover  of  things. 
The  God  is  he  who  identifies  his  own  personal 
life  with  all  lives  and  his  own  things  with  all 
men's  things — who  says  "I'*  forever  every- 
where. 

The  reason  that  the  Hebrew  Bible  has  had 
more  influence  in  history  than  all  other  litera- 
tures combined,  is  that  there  are  fewer  emascu- 
lated men  in  it.  The  one  really  fundamental 
and  astonishing  thing  about  the  Bible  is  the 
way  that  people  have  of  talking  about  them- 
selves in  it.  No  other  nation  that  has  ever 
existed  on  the  earth  would  ever  have  thought 
of  daring  to  publish  a  book  like  the  Bible.  So 
far  as  the  plot  is  concerned,  the  fundamental 
literary  conception,  it  is  all  the  Bible  comes  to 


Ubc  dfirst  person  a  IRecessarp  iBvil 


23 


practically — two  or  three  thousand  years  of  it 
— a  long  row  of  people  talking  about  them- 
selves. The  Hebrew  nation  has  been  the 
leading  power  in  history  because  the  Hebrew 
man,  in  spite  of  all  his  faults  has  always  had 
the  feeling  that  God  sympathised  with  him,  in 
being  interested  in  himself.  He  has  dared  to 
feel  identified  with  God.  It  is  the  same  in  all 
ages — not  an  age  but  one  sees  a  Hebrew  in  it, 
out  under  his  lonely  heaven  standing  and  cry- 
ing *  *  God  and  I. "  It  is  the  one  great  spectacle 
of  the  Soul  this  little  world  has  seen.  Are  not 
the  mightiest  faces  that  come  to  us  flickering 
out  of  the  dark,  their  faces  ?  Who  can  look  at 
the  past  who  does  not  see — who  does  not  always 
see — some  mighty  Hebrew  in  it  singing  and 
struggling  with  God  ?  What  is  it — what  else 
could  it  possibly  be  but  the  Hebrew  soul,  like 
a  kind  of  pageantry  down  the  years  between  us 
and  God,  that  would  ever  have  made  us  guess — 
men  of  the  other  nations — that  a  God  belonged 
to  us,  or  that  a  God  could  belong  to  us  and  be  a 
God  at  all  ?  Have  not  all  the  other  races,  each 
in  their  turn  spawning  in  the  sun  and  lost  in 
the  night,  vanished  because  they  could  not  say 
'*  I "  before  God  ?  The  nations  that  are  left, 
the  great  nations  of  the  modern  world,  are  but 
the  moral  passengers  of  the  Hebrews,  hangers- 
on  to  the  race  that  can  say  **  I  " — I  to  the  n^^ 
power, — the  race  that  has  dared  to  identify  itself 
with  God.  The  fact  that  the  Hebrew,  instead 
of  saying  God  and  I,  has  turned  it  around 


Ube  jpirst 

person  a 

Decessarig 


24 


XTbe  (Ibtl^  and  Ube  J3ooIi 


Tlbe  ^irst 
person  a 
'Vleceesarig 


sometimes  and  said  I  and  God  is  neither  here 
nor  there  in  the  end.  It  is  because  the  Hebrew 
has  kept  to  the  main  point,  has  felt  related  to 
God  (the  main  point  a  God  cares  about),  that 
he  has  been  the  most  heroic  and  athletic  figure 
in  human  history — comes  nearer  to  the  God- 
size.  The  rest  of  the  nations  sitting  about 
and  wondering  in  the  dark,  have  called  this 
thing  in  the  Hebrew  "  religious  genius.*'  If 
one  were  to  try  to  sum  up  what  religious 
genius  is,  in  the  Hebrew,  or  to  account  for  the 
spiritual  and  material  supremacy  of  the  Hebrew 
in  history,  in  a  single  fact,  it  would  be  the  fact 
that  Moses,  their  first  great  leader,  when  he 
wanted  to  say  **  It  seems  to  me,"  said  **  The 
Lord  said  unto  Moses." 

The  Hebrews  may  have  written  a  book  that 
teaches,  of  all  others,  self-renunciation,  but  the 
way  they  taught  it  was  self-assertion.  The 
Bible  begins  with  a  meek  Moses  who  teaches 
by  saying  **  The  lyord  said  unto  Moses,"  and  it 
comes  to  its  climax  in  a  lowly  and  radiant  man 
who  dies  on  a  cross  to  say  "  I  and  the  Father 
are  one.  * '  The  man  Jesus  seems  to  have  called 
himself  God  because  he  had  a  divine  habit  of 
identifying  himself,  because  he  had  kept  on 
identifying  himself  with  others  until  the  first 
person  and  the  second  person  and  the  third 
person  were  as  one  to  him.  The  distinction 
of  the  New  Testament  is  that  it  is  the  one  book 
the  world  has  seen,  which  dispenses  with  pro- 
nouns.    It  is  a  book  that  sums  up  pronouns 


XTbe  Hrt  ot  BeiuG  Hnoni^mous 


25 


and  numbers,  singular  and  plural,  first  person, 
second  and  third  person,  and  all,  in  the  one 
great  central  pronoun  of  the  universe.  The 
very  stars  speak  it — WK. 

We  is  a  developed  I. 

The  first  person  may  not  be  what  it  ought 
to  be  either  as  a  philosophy  or  an  experience, 
but  it  has  been  considered  good  enough  to 
make  Bibles  out  of,  and  it  does  seem  as  if  a 
good  word  might  occasionally  be  said  for  it  in 
modern  times,  as  if  some  one  ought  to  be  born 
before  long,  who  will  give  it  a  certain  stand- 
ing, a  certain  moral  respectability  once  more  in 
human  life  and  in  the  education  of  human  life. 

It  would  not  seem  to  be  an  overstatement 
that  the  best  possible  book  to  give  a  child  to 
read  at  any  time  is  the  one  that  makes  the 
most  cross  references  at  that  time  to  his  unde- 
veloped We. 


Ube  Rtt 

of  JSeing 

Bnonigs 

mous 


II 


Zbe  Hrt  of  Being  anonymous 


The  main  difficulty  in  getting  a  child  to  live 
in  the  whole  of  his  nature,  to  run  the  scale 
from  the  bottom  to  the  top,  from  **  I  "  to  God, 
is  to  persuade  his  parents  and  teachers,  and 
the  people  who  crowd  around  him  to  educate 
him,  that  he  must  begin  at  the  bottom. 

The  Unpopularity  of  the  First  Person  Singu- 
lar in  current  education  naturally  follows  from 


26 


Ubc  CbtlD  ant)  Ube  3Booft 


Ube  Hrt 

of  Seind 

Bnon^s 

moud 


The  Disgrace  of  the  Imagination  in  it.  Our 
typical  school  is  not  satisfied  with  cutting  off  a 
boy's  imagination  about  the  outer  world  that 
lies  around  him.  It  amputates  his  imagination 
at  its  tap  root.  It  stops  a  boy's  imagination 
about  himself,  and  the  issues,  connections,  and 
possibilities  of  his  own  life. 

Inasmuch  as  the  education  of  a  child — his 
relation  to  books — must  be  conducted  either 
with  reference  to  evading  personality,  or  ac- 
cumulating it,  the  issue  is  one  that  must  be 
squarely  drawn  from  the  first.  Beginning  at 
the  bottom  is  found  by  society  at  large  to  be 
such  an  inconvenient  and  painstaking  process, 
that  the  children  who  are  allowed  to  lay  a 
foundation  for  personality — to  say  **  I  "  in  its 
disagreeable  stages — seem  to  be  confined,  for 
the  most  part,  to  either  one  or  the  other  of 
two  classes  —  the  Incurable  or  the  Callous. 
The  more  thorough  a  child's  nature  is,  the 
more  real  his  processes  are,  the  more  incurable 
he  is  bound  to  be — secretly  if  he  is  sensitive, 
and  offensively  if  he  is  callous.  In  either  case 
the  fact  is  the  same.  The  child  unconsciously 
acts  on  the  principle  that  self-assertion  is  self- 
preservation.  One  of  the  first  things  that  he  dis- 
covers is  that  self-preservation  is  the  last  thing 
polite  parents  desire  in  a  child.  If  he  is  to  be 
preserved,  they  will  preserve  him  themselves. 

The  conspiracy  begins  in  the  earliest  days. 
The  world  rolls  over  him.  The  home  and  the 
church  and  the  school  and  the  printed  book 


TLbc  Hrt  ot  Being  Hnoni^mous 


27 


roll  over  him.  The  story  is  the  same  in  all. 
Education — originally  conceived  as  drawing  a 
boy  out  —  becomes  a  huge,  elaborate,  over- 
whelming scheme  for  squeezing  him  in — for 
keeping  him  squeezed  in.  He  is  mobbed  on 
every  side.  At  school  the  teachers  crowd 
round  him  and  say  •*  I"  for  him.  At  home 
his  parents  say  "  I  "  for  him.  At  church  the 
preacher  says  '*  I "  for  him.  And  when  he  re- 
treats into  the  privacy  of  his  own  soul  and  be- 
takes himself  to  a  book,  the  book  is  a  classic 
and  the  book  says  *  *  I "  for  him.  When  he 
says  "  I  "  himself  after  a  few  appropriate  years, 
he  says  it  in  disguised  quotation  marks.  If  he 
cannot  always  avoid  it — if  in  some  unguarded 
moment  he  is  particularly  alive  about  some- 
thing and  the  "I'*  comes  out  on  it,  society 
expects  him  to  be  ashamed  of  it,  at  least  to 
avoid  the  appearance  of  not  being  ashamed  of 
it.  If  he  writes  he  is  desired  to  say  "we." 
Sometimes  he  shades  himself  off  into  "  the 
present  writer."  Sometimes  he  capitulates  in 
bare  initials. 

There  are  very  few  people  who  do  not  live 
in  quotation  marks  most  of  their  lives.  They 
would  die  in  them  and  go  to  heaven  in  them, 
if  they  could.  Nine  times  out  of  ten  it  is 
some  one  else's  heaven  they  want  to  go  to. 
The  number  of  people  who  would  know  what 
to  do  or  how  to  act  in  this  world  or  the  next, 
without  their  quotation  marks  on,  is  getting 
more  limited  every  year. 


Ubc  Hrt 

of  3Being 

Bnoniea 

mott0 


28 


Zbc  (Tbil^  ant)  Xlbc  IBooft 


Ube  Brt 

of  JSeing 

Bnonis* 

mou0 


And  yet  one  could  not  very  well  imagine  a 
world  more  prostrate  that  this  one  is,  before  a 
man  without  quotation  marks.  It  dotes  on 
personality.  It  spends  hundreds  of  years  at  a 
time  in  yearning  for  a  great  man.  But  it 
wants  its  great  man  finished.  It  is  never  will- 
ing to  pay  what  he  costs.  It  is  particularly 
unwilling  to  pay  what  he  costs  as  it  goes  along. 
The  great  man  as  a  boy  has  had  to  pay  for  him- 
self. The  bare  feat  of  keeping  out  of  quotation 
marks  has  cost  him  generally  more  than  he 
thought  he  was  worth — and  has  had  to  be  paid 
in  advance. 

There  is  a  certain  sense  in  which  it  is  true 
that  every  boy,  at  least  at  the  point  where  he 
is  especially  alive,  is  a  kind  of  great  man  in 
miniature — has  the  same  experience,  that  is, 
in  growing.  Many  a  boy  who  has  been  regu- 
larly represented  to  himself  as  a  monster,  a 
curiosity  of  selfishness  (and  who  has  believed 
it),  has  had  occasion  to  observe  when  he  grew  up 
that  some  of  his  selfishness  was  real  selfishness 
and  that  some  of  it  was  life.  The  things  he  was 
selfish  with,  he  finds  as  he  grows  older,  are  the 
things  he  has  been  making  a  man  out  of.  As 
a  boy,  however,  he  does  not  get  much  inkling 
of  this.  He  finds  he  is  being  brought  up  in  a 
world  where  boys  who  so  little  know  how  to 
play  with  their  things  that  they  give  them 
away,  are  pointed  out  to  him  as  generous,  and 
where  boys  who  are  so  bored  with  their  own 
minds  that  they  prefer  other  people's,  are  con- 


Ubc  Hrt  ot  Betna  Hnonpmous 


29 


sidered  modest.  If  he  knew  in  the  days  when 
models  are  being  pointed  out  to  him,  that  the 
time  would  soon  come  in  the  world  for  boys 
like  these  when  it  would  make  little  difference 
either  to  the  boys  themselves,  or  to  any  one 
else,  whether  they  were  generous  or  modest  or 
not,  it  would  make  his  education  happier.  In 
the  meantime,  in  his  disgrace,  he  does  not 
guess  what  a  good  example  to  models  he  is. 
Very  few  other  people  guess  it. 

The  general  truth,  that  when  a  man  has 
nothing  to  be  generous  with,  and  nothing  to 
be  modest  about,  even  his  virtues  are  super- 
fluous, is  realised  by  society  at  large  in  a 
pleasant  helpless  fashion  in  its  bearing  on  the 
man,  but  its  bearing  on  the  next  man,  on  edu- 
cation, on  the  problem  of  human  development, 
is  almost  totally  overlooked. 

The  youth  who  grasps  at  everything  in  sight 
to  have  his  experience  with  it,  who  cares  more 
for  the  thing  than  he  does  for  the  person  it 
comes  from,  and  more  for  his  experience  with 
the  thing  than  he  does  for  the  thing,  is  by  no 
means  an  inspiring  spectacle  while  this  process 
is  going  on,  and  he  is  naturally  in  perpetual 
disgrace,  but  in  proportion  as  they  are  wise, 
our  best  educators  are  aware  that  in  all  proba- 
bility this  same  youth  will  wield  more  spiritual 
power  in  the  world,  and  do  more  good  in  it, 
than  nine  or  ten  pleasantly  smoothed  and  ad- 
justable persons.  His  boy-faults  are  his  man- 
virtues  wrongside  out. 


UbeBrt 

of  Seing 

Hnoni^s 

mou0 


30 


Zbc  Cbil^  auD  Ubc  3Booft 


Ube  Brt 

of  3Being 

Hnons* 

mou0 


There  are  very  few  lives  of  powerful  men  in 
modern  times  that  do  not  illustrate  this.  The 
men  who  do  not  believe  it — who  do  not  ap- 
prove of  illustrating  it,  have  illustrated  it  the 
most — devoted  their  lives  to  it.  It  would  be 
hard  to  find  a  man  of  any  special  importance 
in  modem  biography  who  has  not  been  in- 
debted to  the  sins  of  his  youth.  "It  is  the 
things  I  ought  not  to  have  done— see  page  93, 
179,  321,"  says  the  average  autobiography, 
' '  which  have  been  the  making  of  me. "  "  They 
were  all  good  things  for  me  to  do  (see  page 
526,  632,  720),  but  I  did  not  think  so  when  I 
did  them.  Neither  did  any  one  else. "  * '  Study- 
ing Shakespeare  and  the  theatre  in  the  theo- 
logical seminary,  and  taking  walks  instead  of 
examinations  in  college,"  says  the  biography 
of  Beecher  (between  the  lines),  **  meant  definite 
moral  degeneration  to  me.  I  did  habitually 
what  I  could  not  justify  at  the  time,  either  to 
myself  or  to  others,  and  I  have  had  to  make 
up  since  for  all  the  moral  degeneration,  item 
by  item,  but  the  things  I  got  with  the  de- 
generation when  I  got  it — habits  of  imagina- 
tion, and  expression,  headway  of  personality 
— are  the  things  that  have  given  me  all  my 
inspirations  for  being  moral  since."  "What 
love  of  liberty  I  have,"  Wendell  Phillips 
seems  to  say,  "  I  got  from  loving  my  own." 
It  is  the  boy  who  loves  his  liberty  so  much 
that  he  insists  on  having  it  to  do  wrong  with, 
as  well  as  right,  who  in  the  long  run  gets  the 


Ubc  Hrt  ot  JScing  Hnoni^mous 


31 


most  right  done.  The  basis  of  character  is 
moral  experiment  and  almost  all  the  men  who 
have  discovered  different  or  beautiful  or  right 
habits  of  life  for  men,  have  discovered  them  by- 
doing  wrong  long  enough.  (The  ice  is  thin  at 
this  point,  Gentle  Reader,  for  many  of  us, 
perhaps,  but  it  has  held  up  our  betters.)  The 
fact  of  the  matter  seems  to  be  that  a  man's 
conscience  in  this  world,  especially  if  it  is  an 
educated  one,  or  borrowed  from  his  parents, 
can  get  as  much  in  his  way  as  anything  else. 
There  is  no  doubt  that  The  Great  Spirit  pre- 
fers to  lead  a  man  by  his  conscience,  but  if  it 
cannot  be  done,  if  a  man's  conscience  has 
no  conveniences  for  being  led.  He  leads  him 
against  his  conscience.  The  doctrine  runs 
along  the  edge  of  a  precipice  (like  all  the  best 
ones),  but  if  there  is  one  gift  rather  than  an- 
other to  be  prayed  for  in  this  world  it  is  the 
ability  to  recognise  the  crucial  moment  that 
sometimes  comes  in  a  human  life  —  the  mo- 
ment when  The  Almighty  Himself  gets  a  man 
—  against  his  conscience  —  to  do  right.  It 
seems  to  be  the  way  that  some  consciences  are 
meant  to  grow,  by  trying  wrong  things  on  a 
little.  Thousands  of  inferior  people  can  be 
seen  every  day  stumbling  over  their  sins  to 
heaven,  while  the  rest  of  us  are  holding  back 
with  our  virtues.  It  has  been  intimated  from 
time  to  time  in  this  world  that  all  men  are  sin- 
ners. Inasmuch  as  things  are  arranged  so 
that  men  can  sin  in  doing  right  things,  and 


UbeHrt 

of  Seing 

Bnoniga 

mott0 


32 


XTbe  CbilD  anb  Ube  JBooft 


anb 
SocfetB 


sin  in  doing  wrong  ones  both,  they  can  hardly 
miss  it.  The  real  religion  of  every  age  seems 
to  have  looked  a  little  askance  at  perfection, 
even  at  purity,  has  gone  its  way  in  a  kind  of 
fine  straightforwardness,  has  spent  itself  in  an 
inspired  blundering,  in  progressive  noble  cul- 
minating moral  experiment. 

The  basis  for  a  great  character  seems  to  be 
the  capacity  for  intense  experience  with  the 
character  one  already  has.  So  far  as  most  of 
us  can  judge,  experience,  in  proportion  as  it 
has  been  conclusive  and  economical,  has  had  to 
be  (literally  or  with  one's  imagination)  in  the 
first  person.  The  world  has  never  really 
wanted  yet  (in  spite  of  appearances)  its  own 
way  with  a  man.  It  wants  the  man.  It  is 
what  he  is  that  concerns  it.  All  that  it  asks  of 
him,  and  all  that  he  has  to  give,  is  the  surplus 
of  himself.  The  trouble  with  our  modern 
fashion  of  substituting  the  second  person  or  the 
third  person  for  the  first,  in  a  man's  education, 
is  that  it  takes  his  capacity  for  intense  experi- 
ence of  himself,  his  chance  for  having  a  sur- 
plus of  himself,  entirely  away. 


Ill 


That  the  unpopularity  of  the  first  person 
singular  is  honestly  acquired  and  heartily  de- 
served, it  would  be  useless  to  deny.     Every  one 


jBQOiem  an&  Soctetp 


33 


who  has  ever  had  a  first  person  singular  for  a 
longer  or  shorter  period  in  his  life  knows  that  it 
is  a  disagreeable  thing  and  that  every  one  else 
knows  it,  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten,  at  least,  and 
about  nine  tenths  of  the  time  during  its  devel- 
opment. The  fundamental  question  does  not 
concern  itself  with  the  first  person  singular 
being  agreeable  or  disagreeable,  but  with  what 
to  do  with  it,  it  being  the  necessary  evil  that 
it  is. 

It  seems  to  be  a  reasonable  position  that 
what  should  be  objected  to  in  the  interests  of 
society,  is  not  egoism,  a  man's  being  interested 
in  himself,  but  the  lack  of  egoism,  a  man's 
having  a  self  that  does  not  include  others. 
The  trouble  would  seem  to  be — not  that  people 
use  their  own  private  special  monosyllable  over- 
much, but  that  there  is  not  enough  of  it,  that 
nine  times  out  of  ten,  when  they  write  "  I  "  it 
should  be  written  "  i." 

In  the  face  of  the  political  objection,  the 
objection  of  the  State  to  the  first  person  singu- 
lar, the  egoist  defends  every  man's  reading  for 
himself  as  follows.  Any  book  that  is  allowed 
to  come  between  a  man  and  himself  is  doing 
him  and  all  who  know  him  a  public  injury. 
The  most  important  and  interesting  fact  about 
a  man,  to  other  people,  is  his  attitude  toward 
himself.  It  determines  his  attitude  toward 
every  one  else.  The  most  fundamental  ques- 
tion of  every  State  is:  "  What  is  each  man's 
attitude  in  this  State  toward  himself?    What 


Sgoism 
and 


34 


Ubc  Cbilb  an&  Zbc  Booft 


legoiatn 
and 


can  it  be  ?  "  A  man's  expectancy  toward  him- 
self, so  far  as  the  State  is  concerned,  is  the 
moral  centre  of  citizenship.  It  determines 
how  much  of  what  he  expects  he  will  expect 
of  himself,  and  how  much  he  will  expect  of 
others  and  how  much  of  books.  The  man 
who  expects  too  much  of  himself  develops 
into  the  headlong  and  dangerous  citizen  who 
threatens  society  with  his  strength  —  goes 
elbowing  about  in  it  —  insisting  upon  living 
other  people's  lives  for  them  as  well  as  his 
own.  The  man  who  expects  too  much  of 
others  threatens  society  with  weariness.  He 
is  always  expecting  other  people  to  do  his  liv- 
ing for  him.  The  man  who  expects  too  much 
of  books  lives  neither  in  himself  nor  in  any  one 
else.  The  career  of  the  Paper  Doll  is  open  to 
him.  History  seems  to  be  always  taking  turns 
with  these  three  temperaments  whether  in  art 
or  religion  or  public  affairs, — the  over-manned, 
the  under-manned,  and  the  over-read  —  the 
Tyrant,  the  Tramp,  and  the  Paper  Doll.  Be- 
tween the  man  who  keeps  things  in  his  own 
hands,  and  the  man  who  does  not  care  to,  and 
the  man  who  has  no  hands,  the  State  has  a 
hard  time.  Nothing  could  be  more  important 
to  the  existence  of  the  State  than  that  every 
man  in  it  shall  expect  just  enough  of  himself 
and  just  enough  of  others  and  just  enough  of 
the  world  of  books.  Living  is  adjusting  these 
worlds  to  one  another.  The  central  fact  about 
society  is  the  way  it  helps  a  man  with  himself. 


i  +  ir  =  XRIle 


35 


The  society  which  cuts  a  man  off  from  himself 
cuts  him  still  farther  off  from  every  one  else. 
A  man's  reading  in  the  first  person — enough 
to  have  a  first  person — enough  to  be  identified 
with  himself,  is  one  of  the  defences  of  society. 


i+f=TO6 


IV 


The  most  natural  course  for  a  human  being, 
who  is  going  to  identify  himself  with  other 
people,  is  to  begin  by  practising  on  himself. 
If  he  has  not  succeeded  in  identifying  himself 
with  himself,  he  makes  very  trying  work  of  the 
rest  of  us.  A  man  who  has  not  learned  to  say 
"  I  "  and  mean  something  very  real  by  it,  has 
it  not  in  his  power,  without  dulness  or  im- 
pertinence, to  say  "  you"  to  any  living  crea- 
ture. If  a  man  has  not  learned  to  say  **  you," 
if  he  has  not  taken  hold  of  himself,  inter- 
preted and  adjusted  himself  to  those  who  are 
face  to  face  with  him,  the  wider  and  more 
general  privilege  of  saying  "  they,"  of  judg- 
ing any  part  of  mankind  or  any  temperament 
in  it,  should  be  kept  away  from  him.  It  is 
only  as  one  has  experienced  a  temperament, 
has  in  some  mood  of  one's  life  said  "  I "  in 
that  temperament,  that  one  has  the  outfit  for 
passing  an  opinion  on  it,  or  the  outfit  for  living 
with  it,  or  for  being  in  the  same  world  with  it. 

There  are  times,  it  must  be  confessed,  when 


z^ 


XTbe  dbilb  an&  Zhc  JBooft 


t+i=wie  Christ's  command,  that  every  man  shall  love 
his  neighbour  as  himself,  seems  inconsiderate. 
There  are  some  of  us  who  cannot  help  feeling, 
when  we  see  a  man  coming  along  toward  us 
proposing  to  love  us  a  little  while  the  way  he 
loves  himself,  that  our  permission  might  have 
been  asked.  If  there  is  one  inconvenience 
rather  than  another  in  our  modern  Christian 
society,  it  is  the  general  unprotected  sense  one 
has  in  it,  the  number  of  people  there  are  about 
in  it  (let  loose  by  Sunday-school  teachers  and 
others)  who  are  allowed  to  go  around  loving 
other  people  the  way  they  love  themselves.  A 
codicil  or  at  least  an  explanatory  footnote  to 
the  Golden  Rule,  in  the  general  interest  of 
neighbours,  would  be  widely  appreciated.  How 
shall  a  man  dare  to  love  his  neighbour  as  him- 
self, until  he  loves  himself,  has  a  self  that  he 
really  loves,  a  self  he  can  really  love,  and 
loves  it?  There  is  no  more  sad  or  constant 
spectacle  that  this  modern  world  has  to  face 
than  the  spectacle  of  the  man  who  has  over- 
looked himself,  bustling  about  in  it,  trying  to 
give  honour  to  other  people, — the  man  who 
has  never  been  able  to  help  himself,  hurrying 
anxious  to  and  fro  as  if  he  could  help  some  one 
else. 

It  is  not  too  much  to  say  ** Charity  begins  at 
home."  Everything  does.  The  one  person 
who  has  the  necessary  training  for  being  an 
altruist  is  the  alert  egoist  who  does  not  know 
he  is  an  altruist.     His  service  to  society  is  a 


i  +  H  =  Me 


37 


more  intense  and  comprehensive  selfishness. 
He  would  be  cutting  acquaintance  with  him- 
self not  to  render  it.  When  he  says  **  I  "  he 
means  **  we,"  and  the  second  and  third  persons 
are  grown  dim  to  him. 

An  absolutely  perfect  virtue  is  the  conveying 
of  a  man's  self,  with  a  truth,  to  others.  The 
virtues  that  do  not  convey  anything  are  cheap 
and  common  enough.  Favours  can  be  had 
almost  any  day  from  anybody,  if  one  is  not  too 
particular,  and  so  can  blank  staring  self-sacri- 
fices. One  feels  like  putting  up  a  sign  over 
the  door  of  one's  life,  with  some  people:  "lyCt 
no  man  do  me  a  favour  except  he  do  it  as  a 
self-indulgence."  Kven  kindness  wears  out, 
shows  through,  becomes  impertinent,  if  it  is 
not  a  part  of  selfishness.  It  may  be  that  there 
are  certain  rudimentary  virtues  the  outer  form 
of  which  had  better  be  maintained  in  the  world, 
whether  they  can  be  maintained  spiritually — 
that  is,  thoroughly  and  egotistically,  or  not. 
If  my  enemy  who  lives  under  the  hill  will  con- 
tinue to  not-murder  me,  I  desire  him  to  con- 
tinue whether  he  enjoys  not-murdering  me  or 
not.  But  it  is  no  credit  to  him.  Except  in 
some  baldly  negative  fashion  as  this,  however, 
it  is  literally  true  that  a  man's  virtues  are  of 
little  account  to  others  except  as  they  are  of 
account  to  him,  and  except  he  enjoys  them  as 
much  as  his  vices.  The  first  really  important 
shock  that  comes  to  a  young  man's  religious 
sentiment  in   this   world   is   the   number  of 


i+t='mc 


38 


XTbc  Cbil^  auD  XTbe  Boola 


i+i=xicic  bored-looking  people  around,  doing  right. 
An  absolutely  substantial  and  perfect  love 
is  transfigured  selfishness.  It  is  no  mere 
playing  with  words  to  say  this,  nor  is  it 
substituting  a  comfortable  and  pleasant  doc- 
trine for  a  strenuous  altruism.  If  it  were  as 
light  and  graceful  an  undertaking  to  have 
enough  selfishness  to  go  around,  to  live  in  the 
whole  of  a  universe  like  this,  as  it  is  to  slip  out 
of  even  living  in  one's  self  in  it,  like  a  mere 
shadow  or  altruist,  egoism  were  superficial 
enough.  As  it  is,  egoism  being  terribly  or 
beautifully  alive,  so  far  as  it  goes,  is  now  and 
always  has  been,  and  always  must  be  the  run- 
ning gear  of  the  spiritual  world — egoism  social- 
ised. The  first  person  is  what  the  second  and 
third  persons  are  made  out  of.  Altruism,  as 
opposed  to  egoism,  except  in  a  temporary 
sense,  is  a  contradiction  in  terms.  Unless  a 
man  has  a  life  to  identify  other  lives  with,  a 
self  which  is  the  symbol  through  which  he 
loves  all  other  selves  and  all  other  experiences, 
he  is  selfish  in  the  true  sense. 

With  all  our  Galileos,  Agassizes,  and  Shake- 
speares,  the  universe  has  not  grown  in  its 
countless  centuries.  It  has  not  been  getting 
higher  and  wider  over  us  since  the  human 
race  began.  It  is  not  a  larger  universe.  It  is 
lived  in  by  larger  men,  more  all-absorbing,  all- 
identifying,  and  selfish  men.  It  is  a  universe 
in  which  a  human  being  is  duly  born,  given 
place  with  such  a  self  as  he  happens  to  have, 


i  +  H  =  TOe 


39 


and  he  is  expected  to  grow  up  to  it.  Barring 
a  certain  amount  of  wear  and  tear  and  a  few 
minor  rearrangements  on  the  outside,  it  is  the 
same  universe  that  it  was  in  the  beginning, 
and  is  now  and  always  will  be  quite  the  same 
universe,  whether  a  man  grows  up  to  it  or  not. 
The  larger  universe  is  not  one  that  comes  with 
the  telescope.  It  comes  with  the  larger  self, 
the  self  that  by  reaching  farther  and  farther 
in,  reaches  farther  and  farther  out.  It  is  as  if 
the  sky  were  a  splendour  that  grew  by  night 
out  of  his  own  heart,  the  tent  of  his  love  of 
God  spreading  its  roof  over  the  nature  of 
things.  The  greater  distance  knowledge 
reaches,  the  more  it  has  to  be  personal,  because 
it  has  to  be  spiritual. 

The  one  thing  that  it  is  necessary  to  do  in 
any  part  of  the  world  to  make  any  branch  of 
knowledge  or  deed  of  mercy,  a  living  and  eager 
thing,  is  to  get  men  to  see  how  direct  its  bear- 
ing is  upon  themselves.  The  man  who  does 
not  feel  concerned  when  the  Armenians  are 
massacred,  thousands  of  miles  away,  because 
there  is  a  sea  between,  is  not  a  different  man 
in  kind  from  the  man  who  does  feel  concerned. 
The  difference  is  one  of  degree.  It  is  a  matter 
of  area  in  living.  The  man  who  does  feel  con- 
cerned has  a  larger  self.  He  sees  further,  feels 
the  cry  as  the  cry  of  his  own  children.  He 
has  learned  the  oneness  and  is  touched  with 
the  closeness,  of  the  great  family  of  the  world. 


i+l=*DClc 


40 


XTbe  Cbtlt)  ant>  TLbc  Booft 


(Lbe  Hutoblograpb?  of  Beauti? 


Ube  ButOA 
biograpb^ 
of  Scauts 


But  the  brunt  of  the  penalty  of  the  unpopu- 
larity of  the  first  person  singular  in  modern 
society  falls  upon  the  individual.  The  hard 
part  of  it,  for  a  man  who  has  not  the  daily 
habit  of  being  a  companion  to  himself,  is  his 
own  personal  private  sense  of  emptiness — of 
missing  things.  All  the  universe  gets  itself 
addressed  to  some  one  else  —  a  great  showy 
heartless  pantomime  it  rolls  over  him,  beckon- 
ing with  its  nights  and  days  and  winds  and 
faces— always  beckoning,  but  to  some  one  else. 
All  that  seems  to  be  left  to  him  in  a  universe 
is  a  kind  of  keeping  up  appearances  in  it — a 
looking  as  if  he  lived — a  hurrying,  dishonest 
trying  to  forget.  He  dare  not  sit  down  and 
think.  He  spends  his  strength  in  racing  with 
himself  to  get  away  from  himself,  and  those 
greatest  days  of  all  in  human  life — the  days 
when  men  grow  old,  world-gentle,  and  still 
and  deep  before  their  God,  are  the  days  he 
dreads  the  most.  He  can  only  look  forward  to 
old  age  as  the  time  when  a  man  sits  down  with 
his  lie  at  last,  and  day  after  day  and  night 
after  night  faces  infinite  and  eternal  loneliness 
in  his  own  heart. 

It  is  the  man  who  cuts  acquaintance  with 
himself,  who  dares  to  be  lonely  with  himself, 
who  dares  the  supreme  daring  in  this  world. 


XCbe  Hutobtograpbp  ot  JSeautp 


41 


He  and  his  loneliness  are  hermetically  sealed 
up  together  in  infinite  Time,  infinite  Space, — 
not  a  great  man  of  all  that  have  been,  not  a 
star  or  flower,  not  even  a  great  book  that  can 
get  at  him. 

It  is  the  nature  of  a  great  book  that  in  pro- 
portion as  it  is  beautiful  it  makes  itself  helpless 
before  a  human  soul.  I^ike  music  or  poetry  or 
painting  it  lays  itself  radiant  and  open  before 
all  that  lies  before  it  —  to  everything  or  to 
nothing,  whatever  it  may  be.  It  makes  the 
direct  appeal.  Before  the  days  and  years  of  a 
man's  life  it  stands.  *  *  Is  not  this  so  ?  "  it  says. 
It  never  says  less  than  this.  It  does  not  know 
how  to  say  more. 

A  bare  and  trivial  book  stops  with  what  it 
says  itself.  A  great  book  depends  now  and 
forever  upon  what  it  makes  a  man  say  back, 
and  if  he  does  not  say  anything,  if  he  does  not 
bring  anything  to  it  to  say,  nothing  out  of  his 
own  observation,  passion,  experience,  to  be 
called  out  by  the  passing  words  upon  the  page, 
the  most  living  book,  in  its  board  and  paper 
prison,  is  a  dead  and  helpless  thing  before  a 
Dead  Soul.  The  helplessness  of  the  Dead 
Soul  lies  upon  it. 

Perhaps  there  is  no  more  important  distinc- 
tion between  a  great  book  and  a  little  book 
than  this  —  that  the  great  book  is  always  a 
listener  before  a  human  life,  and  the  little  book 
takes  nothing  for  granted  of  a  reader.  It  does 
not  expect  anything  of  him.     The  littler  it  is. 


Ubc  Hutos 
bfograpbs 
of  3Beaut^ 


42 


Ubc  CbtlD  auD  XTbc  IBooft 


Ube  Butos 
bfograpbs 
of  3Beautis 


the  less  it  expects  and  the  more  it  explains. 
Nothing  that  is  really  great  and  living  ex- 
plains. Living  is  enough.  If  greatness  does 
not  explain  by  being  great,  nothing  smaller 
can  explain  it.  God  never  explains.  He 
merely  appeals  to  every  man's  first  person 
singular.  Religion  is  not  what  He  has  told  to 
men.  It  is  what  He  has  made  men  wonder 
about  until  they  have  been  determined  to  find 
out.  The  stars  have  never  been  published 
with  footnotes.  The  sun,  with  its  huge,  soft 
shining  on  people,  kept  on  with  the  shining 
even  when  the  people  thought  it  was  doing  so 
trivial  and  undignified  and  provincial  a  thing 
as  to  spend  its  whole  time  going  around  them, 
and  around  their  little  earth,  that  they  might 
have  light  on  it  perchance,  and  be  kept  warm. 
The  moon  has  never  gone  out  of  its  way  to 
prove  that  it  is  not  made  of  green  cheese. 
And  this  present  planet  we  are  allowed  the  use 
of  from  year  to  year,  which  was  so  little  ob- 
served for  thousands  of  generations  that  all  the 
people  on  it  supposed  it  was  flat,  made  no  an- 
swer through  the  centuries.  It  kept  on  burying 
them  one  by  one,  and  waited — like  a  work  of 
genius  or  a  masterpiece. 

In  proportion  as  a  thing  is  beautiful,  whether 
of  man  or  God,  it  has  this  heroic  helplessness 
about  it  with  the  passing  soul  or  generation  of 
souls.  If  people  are  foolish,  it  can  but  appeal 
from  one  dear,  pitiful  fool  to  another  until 
enough  of  us  have  died  to  make  it  time  for  a 


Ube  Hutobioarapbp  ot  IBeaut^ 


43 


wise  man  again.  History  is  a  series  of  crises 
like  this,  in  which  once  in  so  often  men  who  say 
"I"  have  crossed  the  lives  of  mortals— have 
puzzled  the  world  enough  to  be  remembered  in 
it,  like  Socrates,  or  been  abused  by  it  enough 
to  make  it  love  them  forever,  like  Christ. 

The  greatest  revelation  of  history  is  the  pa- 
tience of  the  beauty  in  it,  and  truth  can  always 
be  known  by  the  fact  that  it  is  the  only  thing 
in  the  wide  world  that  can  afford  to  wait.  A 
true  book  does  not  go  about  advertising  itself, 
huckstering  for  souls,  arranging  its  greatness 
small  enough.  It  waits.  Sometimes  for  twenty 
years  it  waits  for  us,  sometimes  for  forty,  some- 
times sixty,  and  then  when  the  time  is  fulfilled 
and  we  come  at  length  and  lay  before  it  the 
burden  of  the  blind  and  blundering  years  we 
have  tried  to  live,  it  does  little  with  us,  after 
all,  but  to  bring  these  same  years  singing  and 
crying  and  struggling  back  to  us,  that  through 
their  shadowy  doors  we  may  enter  at  last  the 
confessional  of  the  human  heart,  and  cry  out 
there,  or  stammer  or  whisper  or  sing  there, 
the  prophecy  of  our  own  lives.  Dead  words 
out  of  dead  dictionaries  the  book  brings  to  us. 
It  is  a  great  book  because  it  is  a  listening  book, 
because  it  makes  the  unspoken  to  speak  and 
the  dead  to  live  in  it.  To  the  vanished  pen 
and  the  yellowed  paper  of  the  man  who  writes 
to  us,  thy  soul  and  mine.  Gentle  Reader,  shall 
call  back,  "  This  is  the  truth." 

If  a  book  has  force  in  it,  whatever  its  literary 


Tlbc  Butos 
biograpbi; 
of  3Beautie 


44 


XTbe  (TbtlJ)  an^  XTbe  Book 


Ube  Butos 
biograpbis 
of  JBeauts 


form  may  be,  or  however  disguised,  it  is  biog- 
raphy appealing  to  biography.  If  a  book  has 
great  force  in  it,  it  is  autobiography  appealing 
to  autobiography.  The  great  book  is  always 
a  confession  —  a  moral  adventure  with  its 
reader,  an  incredible  confidence. 


45 


The  Third  Interference: 

The  Habit  of  Not  Let- 

ting  One's  Self  Go 


Zhc  Country?  Bo)?  In  Xlterature 

"T    KT  not  any  Parliament  Member,"  says        Ube 

L     Carlyle,   '*ask  of  the  Present  Editor      ^^^^^^^ 
*  What  is  to  be  done  ? '     Editors  are  not  here    literature 
to  say,  *  How.'  " 

* '  Which  is  both  ungracious  and  tantalisingly 
elusive,"  suggests  a  Professor  of  Literature, 
who  has  been  recently  criticising  the  Nine- 
teenth Century. 

This  criticism,  as  a  part  of  an  estimate  of 
Thomas  Carlyle,  is  not  only  a  criticism  on 
itself  and  an  autobiography  besides,  but  it 
sums  up,  in  a  more  or  less  characteristic  fashion 


46 


XTbe  Cbil^  anb  XTbe  Booft 


TTbc 
Country? 

Xitecature 


perhaps,  what  might  be  called  the  ultra-aca- 
demic attitude  in  reading.  The  ultra-academic 
attitude  may  be  defined  as  the  attitude  of  sit- 
ting down  and  being  told  things,  and  of  ex- 
pecting all  other  persons  to  sit  down  and  be 
told  things,  and  of  judging  all  authors,  prin- 
ciples, men,  and  methods  accordingly. 

If  the  universe  were  what  in  most  libraries 
and  clubs  to-day  it  is  made  to  seem,  a  kind 
of  infinite  Institution  of  Learning,  a  Lecture 
Room  on  a  larger  scale,  and  if  all  the  men  in 
it,  instead  of  doing  and  singing  in  it,  had 
spent  their  days  in  delivering  lectures  to  it, 
there  would  be  every  reason,  in  a  universe 
arranged  for  lectures,  why  we  should  exact  of 
those  who  give  them,  that  they  should  make 
the  truth  plain  to  us  —  so  plain  that  there 
would  be  nothing  left  for  us  to  do,  with  truth, 
but  to  read  it  in  the  printed  book,  and  then 
analyse  the  best  analysis  of  it — and  die. 

It  seems  to  be  quite  generally  true  of  those 
who  have  been  the  great  masters  of  literature, 
however,  that  in  proportion  as  they  have  been 
great  they  have  proved  to  be  as  ungracious 
and  as  tantalisingly  elusive  as  the  universe 
itself.  They  have  refused,  without  exception, 
to  bear  down  on  the  word  ' '  how. ' '  They  have 
almost  never  told  men  what  to  do,  and  have 
confined  themselves  to  saying  something  that 
would  make  them  do  it,  and  make  them  find 
a  way  to  do  it.  This  something  that  they 
have  said,  like  the  something  that  they  have 


XTbe  Countri?  JSos  in  literature 


47 


lived,  has  come  to  them  they  know  not  how, 
and  it  has  gone  from  them  they  know  not  how, 
sometimes  not  even  when.  It  has  been  incom- 
municable, incalculable,  infinite,  the  subcon- 
scious self  of  each  of  them,  the  voice  beneath 
the  voice,  calling  down  the  corridors  of  the 
world. 

If  a  boy  from  the  country  were  to  stand  in  a 
city  street  before  the  window  of  a  shop,  gazing 
into  it  with  open  mouth,  he  would  do  more  in 
five  or  six  minutes  to  measure  the  power  and 
calibre  of  the  passing  men  and  women  than 
almost  any  device  that  could  be  arranged. 
Ninety-five  out  of  a  hundred  of  them,  prob- 
ably, would  smile  a  superior  smile  at  him  and 
hurry  on.  Out  of  the  remaining  five,  four 
would  look  again  and  pity  him.  One,  per- 
haps, would  honour  and  envy  him. 

The  boy  who,  in  a  day  like  the  present  one, 
is  still  vital  enough  to  forget  how  he  looks  in 
enjoying  something,  is  not  only  a  rare  and  re- 
freshing spectacle,  but  he  is  master  of  the  most 
important  intellectual  and  moral  superiority 
a  boy  can  be  master  of,  and  if,  in  spite  of 
teachers  and  surroundings,  he  can  keep  this 
superiority  long  enough,  or  until  he  comes  to 
be  a  man,  he  shall  be  the  kind  of  man  whose 
very  faults  shall  be  remembered  better  and 
cherished  more  by  a  doting  world  than  the 
virtues  of  the  rest  of  us. 

The  most  important  fact — perhaps  the  only 
important    fact  —  about  James  Boswell  —  the 


Ube 

(Eountr)? 

3Bo?  in 

Xiterature 


48 


TLbc  (TbtlD  ant)  XTbe  Booft 


trbe 

Countrie 

3BOT2  in 

literature 


country  boy  of  literature — is  that,  whatever 
may  have  been  his  limitations,  he  had  the 
most  important  gift  that  life  can  give  to  a  man 
— the  gift  of  forgetting  himself  in  it.  In  the 
Fleet  Street  of  letters,  smiling  at  him  and  jeer- 
ing by  him,  who  does  not  always  see  James 
Boswell,  completely  lost  to  the  street,  gaping 
at  the  soul  of  Samuel  Johnson  as  if  it  were  the 
show  window  of  the  world,  as  if  to  be  allowed 
to  look  at  a  soul  like  this  were  almost  to  have 
a  soul  one's  self? 

Boswell's  Li/e  of  Johnson  is  a  classic  because 
James  Boswell  had  the  classic  power  in  him  of 
unconsciousness.  To  book-labourers,  college 
employees,  analysis-hands  of  whatever  kind, 
his  book  is  a  standing  notice  that  the  pre- 
rogative of  being  immortal  is  granted  by  men, 
even  to  a  fool,  if  he  has  the  grace  not  to  know 
it.  For  that  matter,  even  if  the  fool  knows  he 
is  a  fool,  if  he  cares  more  about  his  subject  than 
he  cares  about  not  letting  any  one  else  know  it, 
he  is  never  forgotten.  The  world  cannot  afford 
to  leave  such  a  fool  out.  Is  it  not  a  world  in 
which  there  is  not  a  man  living  of  us  who  does 
not  cherish  in  his  heart  a  little  secret  like  this  of 
his  own  ?  We  are  bound  to  admit  that  the  main 
difference  between  James  Boswell  and  the  rest, 
consists  in  the  fact  that  James  Boswell  found 
something  in  the  world  so  much  more  worth  liv- 
ing for,  than  not  letting  the  common  secret  out, 
that  he  lived  for  it,  and  like  all  the  other  great 
naives  he  will  never  get  over  living  for  it. 


Zbc  dounttp  3Bop  in  Xiteraturc 


49 


Even  allowing  that  Boswell's  consistent  and 
unfailing  motive  in  cultivating  Samuel  Johnson 
was  vanity,  this  very  vanity  of  Boswell's  has 
more  genius  in  it  than  Johnson's  vocabulary, 
and  the  important  and  inspiring  fact  remains, 
that  James  Boswell,  a  flagrantly  commonplace 
man  in  every  single  respect,  by  the  law  of  letting 
himself  go,  has  taken  his  stand  forever  in  Eng- 
lish literature,  as  the  one  commonplace  man  in 
it  who  has  produced  a  work  of  genius.  The 
main  quality  of  a  man  of  genius,  his  power  of 
sacrificing  everything  to  his  main  purpose,  be- 
longed to  him.  He  was  not  only  willing  to 
seem  the  kind  of  fool  he  was,  but  he  did  not 
hesitate  to  seem  several  kinds  that  he  was 
not,  to  fulfil  his  main  purpose.  That  Samuel 
Johnson  might  be  given  the  ponderous  and 
gigantic  and  looming  look  that  a  Samuel  John- 
son ought  to  have,  Boswell  painted  himself  into 
his  picture  with  more  relentlessness  than  any 
other  author  that  can  be  called  to  mind,  ex- 
cept three  or  four  similarly  commonplace  and 
similarly  inspired  and  self-forgetful  persons  in 
tjie  New  Testament,  There  has  never  been 
any  other  biography  in  England  with  the 
single  exception  of  Pepys,  in  which  the  author 
has  so  completely  lost  himself  in  his  subject. 
If  the  author  of  Johnson's  life  had  written  his 
book  with  the  inspiration  of  not  being  laughed 
at  (which  is  the  inspiration  that  nine  out  of 
ten  who  love  to  laugh  are  likely  to  write  with), 
James  Boswell  would  never  have  been  heard 


Ube 
Country 

Xiteratnre 


50 


XTbe  CbilO  anO  Ube  JBook 


Ube 
(tountri? 

literature 


of,  and  the  burly  figure  of  Samuel  Johnson 
would  be  a  blur  behind  a  dictionary. 

It  may  be  set  down  as  one  of  the  necessary 
principles  of  the  reading  habit  that  no  true  and 
vital  reading  is  possible  except  as  the  reader 
possesses  and  employs  the  gift  of  letting  him- 
self go.  It  is  a  gift  that  William  Shakespeare 
and  James  Boswell  and  Elijah  and  Charles 
Lamb  and  a  great  many  other  happy  but  un- 
important people  have  had  in  common.  No 
man  of  genius — a  man  who  puts  his  best  and 
his  most  unconscious  self  into  his  utterance — 
can  be  read  or  listened  to  or  interpreted  for 
one  moment  without  it.  Except  from  those 
who  bring  to  him  the  greeting  of  their  own 
unconscious  selves,  he  hides  himself.  He 
gives  himself  only  to  those  with  whom  uncon- 
sciousness is  a  daily  habit,  with  whom  the  joy 
of  letting  one's  self  go  is  one  of  the  great  re- 
sources of  life.  This  joy  is  back  of  every  great 
act  and  every  deep  appreciation  in  the  world, 
and  it  is  the  charm  and  delight  of  the  smaller 
ones.  On  its  higher  levels,  it  is  called  genius 
and  inspiration.  In  religion  it  is  called  faith. 
It  is  the  primal  energy  both  of  art  and  religion. 

Probably  only  the  man  who  has  very  little 
would  be  able  to  tell  what  faith  is,  as  a  basis 
of  art  or  religion,  but  we  have  learned  some 
things  that  it  is  not.  We  know  that  faith  is 
not  a  dead-lift  of  the  brain,  a  supreme  effort 
either  for  God  or  for  ourselves.  It  is  the  soul 
giving  itself  up,   finding  itself,   feeling  itself 


XTbe  Subconscious  Self 


51 


drawn  to  its  own,  into  infinite  space,  face  to 
face  with  strength.  It  is  the  supreme  swing- 
ing-free of  the  spirit,  the  becoming  a  part  of 
the  running-gear  of  things.  Faith  is  not  an 
act  of  the  imagination — to  the  man  who  knows 
it.  It  is  infinite  fact,  the  infinite  crowding  of 
facts,  the  drawing  of  the  man-self  upward  and 
outward,  where  he  is  surrounded  with  the  in- 
finite man-self.  Perhaps  a  man  can  make  him- 
self not  believe.  He  can  not  make  himself 
believe.  He  can  only  believe  by  letting  him- 
self go,  by  trusting  the  force  of  gravity  and 
the  law  of  space  around  him.  Faith  is  the 
universe  flowing  silently,  implacably,  through 
his  soul.  He  has  given  himself  up  to  it.  In 
the  tiniest,  noisiest  noon  his  spirit  is  flooded 
with  the  stars.  He  is  let  out  to  the  boundaries 
of  heaven  and  the  night-sky  bears  him  up  in 
the  heat  of  the  day. 

In  the  presence  of  a  great  work  of  art — a 
work  of  inspiration  or  faith,  there  is  no  such 
thing  as  appreciation,  without  letting  one's 
self  go. 

II 

Zhc  Subcon0dou0  Self 

The  criticism  of  Carlyle's  remark,  "  Editors 
are  not  here  to  say  *  How,'  " — that  it  is  "  un- 
gracious and  tantalisingly  elusive,"  is  a  fair 
illustration  of  the  mood  to  which  the  habit  of 


Ube  Subs 

conscious 

Self 


52 


XTbe  Cbil^  an^  Ubc  Booft 


Ube  Sub» 

conscious 

Self 


analysis  leads  its  victims.  The  explainer  can- 
not let  himself  go.  The  puttering  love  of  ex- 
plaining and  the  need  of  explaining  dog  his 
soul  at  every  turn  of  thought  or  thought  of 
having  a  thought.  He  not  only  puts  a  micro- 
scope to  his  eyes  to  know  with,  but  his  eyes 
have  ingrown  microscopes.  The  microscope 
has  become  a  part  of  his  eyes.  He  cannot  see 
anything  without  putting  it  on  a  slide,  and 
when  his  microscope  will  not  focus  it,  and  it 
cannot  be  reduced  and  explained,  he  explains 
that  it  is  not  there. 

The  man  of  genius,  on  the  other  hand,  with 
whom  truth  is  an  experience  instead  of  a  speci- 
men, has  learned  that  the  probabilities  are  that 
the  more  impossible  it  is  to  explain  a  truth 
the  more  truth  there  is  in  it.  In  so  far  as  the 
truth  is  an  experience  to  him,  he  is  not  looking 
for  slides.  He  will  not  mount  it  as  a  specimen 
and  he  is  not  interested  in  seeing  it  explained 
or  focussed.  He  lives  with  it  in  his  own  heart 
in  so  far  as  he  possesses  it,  and  he  looks  at  it 
with  a  telescope  for  that  greater  part  which  he 
cannot  possess.  The  microscope  is  perpetually 
mislaid.  He  has  the  experience  itself  and  the 
one  thing  he  wants  to  do  with  it  is  to  convey 
it  to  others.  He  does  this  by  giving  himself 
up  to  it.  The  truth  having  become  a  part  of 
him  by  his  thus  giving  himself  up,  it  becomes 
a  part  of  his  reader,  by  his  reader's  giving 
himself  up. 

Reading  a  work  of  genius  is  one  man's  un- 


Ubc  Subconscious  Self 


53 


consciousness  greeting  another  man's.  No 
author  of  the  higher  class  can  possibly  be  read 
without  this  mutual  exchange  of  unconscious- 
ness. He  cannot  be  explained.  He  cannot 
explain  himself.  And  he  cannot  be  enjoyed, 
appreciated,  or  criticised  by  those  who  expect 
him  to.  Spiritual  things  are  spiritually  dis- 
cerned, that  is,  experienced  things  are  dis- 
cerned by  experience.  They  are  * '  ungracious 
and  tantalisingly  elusive." 

When  the  man  who  has  a  little  talent  tells  a 
truth  he  tells  the  truth  so  ill  that  he  is  obliged 
to  tell  how  to  do  it.  The  artist,  on  the  other 
hand,  having  given  himself  up  to  the  truth, 
almost  always  tells  it  as  if  he  were  listening  to 
it,  as  if  he  were  being  borne  up  by  it,  as  by 
some  great  delight,  even  while  he  speaks  to  us. 
It  is  the  power  of  the  artist's  truth  when  he 
writes  like  this  that  it  shall  haunt  his  reader 
as  it  has  haunted  him.  He  lives  with  it  and 
is  haunted  by  it  day  after  day  whether  he 
wants  to  be  or  not,  and  when  a  human  being 
is  obliged  to  live  with  a  burning  truth  inside 
of  him  every  day  of  his  life,  he  will  find  a  how 
for  it,  he  will  find  some  way  of  saying  it,  of 
getting  it  outside  of  him,  of  doing  it,  if  only 
for  the  common  and  obvious  reason  that  it 
burns  the  heart  out  of  a  man  who  does  not. 
If  the  truth  is  really  in  a  man — a  truth  to  be 
done, — he  finds  out  how  to  do  it  as  a  matter  of 
self-preservation. 

The  average  man  no  doubt  will  continue 


Ube  Suba 

conscious 

Sclt 


54 


Ubc  Cbtlb  an&  XTbe  JBooft 


Ube  Sub- 
conscious 
Self 


now  as  always  to  consider  Carlyle's  **  Editors 
are  not  here  to  say  '  How '  ' '  ungracious  and 
tantalisingly  elusive.  He  demands  of  every 
writer  not  only  that  he  shall  write  the  truth 
for  every  man  but  that  he  shall — practically — 
read  it  for  him — that  is,  tell  him  how  to  read 
it — the  best  part  of  reading  it.  It  is  by  this 
explaining  the  truth  too  much,  by  making  it 
small  enough  for  small  people  that  so  many  lies 
have  been  made  out  of  it.  The  gist  of  the 
matter  seems  to  be  that  if  the  spirit  of  the  truth 
does  not  inspire  a  man  to  some  more  eager  way 
of  finding  out  how  to  do  a  truth  than  asking 
some  other  man  how  to  do  it,  it  must  be  some 
other  spirit.  The  way  out  for  the  explotterat- 
ing  or  weak  man  does  not  consist  in  the  sci- 
entist's or  the  commentator's  how,  or  the 
artist's  how,  or  in  any  other  strain  of  helping 
the  ground  to  hold  one  up.  It  consists  in  the 
power  of  letting  one's  self  go. 

To  say  nothing  of  appreciation  of  power, 
criticisim  of  power  is  impossible,  without  let- 
ting one's  self  go.  Criticism  which  is  not  the 
faithful  remembering  and  reporting  of  an  un- 
conscious mood  is  not  worthy  of  being  called 
criticism  at  all.  A  critic  cannot  find  even  the 
faults  of  a  book  who  does  not  let  himself  go  in 
it,  and  there  is  not  a  man  living  who  can  ex- 
pect to  write  a  criticism  of  a  book  until  he  has 
given  himself  a  chance  to  have  an  experience 
with  it,  to  write  his  criticism  with.  The  larger 
part  of  the  professional  criticism  of  the  ages 


TTbe  Subconscious  Self 


55 


that  are  past  has  proved  worthless  to  us,  be- 
cause the  typical  professional  critic  has  gen- 
erally been  a  man  who  professes  not  to  let 
himself  go  and  who  is  proud  of  it.  If  it  were 
not  for  the  occasional  possibility  of  his  being 
stunned  by  a  book — made  unconscious  by  it, — 
the  professional  critic  of  the  lesser  sort  would 
never  say  anything  of  interest  to  us  at  all,  and 
even  if  he  did,  being  a  maimed  and  defective 
conscious  person,  the  evidence  that  he  was 
stunned  is  likely  to  be  of  more  significance 
than  anything  he  may  say  about  the  book  that 
stunned  him,  or  about  the  way  he  felt  when  he 
was  being  stunned.  Having  had  very  little 
practice  in  being  unconscious,  the  bare  fact  is 
all  that  he  can  remember  about  it.  The  un- 
consciousness of  a  person  who  has  long  lost  the 
habit  of  unconsciousness  is  apt  to  be  a  kind 
of  groping  stupor  or  deadness  at  its  best,  and 
not,  as  with  the  artist,  a  state  of  being,  a  way 
of  being  incalculably  alive,  and  of  letting  in 
infinite  life.  It  is  a  small  joy  that  is  not  un- 
conscious. The  man  who  knows  he  is  reading 
when  he  has  a  book  in  his  hands,  does  not 
know  very  much  about  books. 

People  who  always  know  what  time  it  is,  who 
always  know  exactly  where  they  are,  and  ex- 
actly how  they  look,  have  it  not  in  their  power 
to  read  a  great  book.  The  book  that  comes  to 
the  reader  as  a  great  book  is  always  one  that 
shares  with  him  the  infinite  and  the  eternal  in 
himself. 


Ube  Stxbm 

conscious 

Self 


56 


Ubc  Cbtlt)  ant)  TLbc  Book 


TZbC 
(Organic 

Principle 
of  Una 

epication 


There  is  a  time  to  know  what  time  it  is,  and 
there  is  a  time  not  to,  and  there  are  many 
places  small  enough  to  know  where  they  are. 
The  book  that  knows  what  time  it  is,  in  every 
sentence,  will  always  be  read  by  the  clock,  but 
the  great  book,  the  book  with  infinite  vistas  in 
it,  shall  not  be  read  by  men  with  a  rim  of  time 
around  it.  The  place  of  it  is  unmeasured,  and 
there  is  no  sound  that  men  can  make  which 
shall  tick  in  that  place. 


Ill 

ZCbe  ©rganic  principle  of  llnapi* 
ration 


I^etting  one's  self  go  is  but  a  half-principle, 
however,  to  do  one's  reading  with.  The  other 
half  consists  in  getting  one's  self  together 
again.  In  proportion  as  we  truly  appreciate 
what  we  read,  we  find  ourselves  playing  at  be- 
ing Boswell  to  a  book  and  being  Johnson  to  it 
by  turns.  The  vital  reader  lets  himself  go  and 
collects  himself  as  the  work  before  him  de- 
mands. There  are  some  books,  where  it  is 
necessary  to  let  one's  self  go  from  beginning 
to  end.  There  are  others  where  a  man  may 
sit  as  he  sits  at  a  play,  being  himself  between 
acts,  or  at  proper  intervals  when  the  author  lets 
down  the  curtain,  and  being  translated  the  rest 
of  the  time. 


Ube  ©raanfc  principle  ot  ITnspiration 


57 


Our  richest  moods  are  those  in  which,  as  we 
look  back  upon  them,  we  seem  to  have  been 
impressing,  impressionable,  creative,  and  re- 
ceptive at  the  same  time.  The  alternating 
currents  of  these  moods  are  so  swift  that  they 
seem  simultaneous,  and  the  immeasurable 
swiftness  with  which  they  pass  from  one  to  the 
other  is  the  soul's  instinctive  method  of  kin- 
dling itself— the  very  act  of  inspiration.  Some- 
times the  subconscious  self  has  it  all  its  own 
way  with  us  except  for  a  corner  of  dim,  burn- 
ing consciousness  keeping  guard.  Sometimes 
the  conscious  has  it  all  its  own  way  with  us 
and  the  subconscious  self  is  crowded  to  the 
horizon's  edge,  like  Northern  lyights  still  play- 
ing in  the  distance ;  but  the  result  is  the  same 
— the  dim  presence  of  one  of  these  moods  in 
the  other,  when  one's  power  is  least  effective, 
and  the  gradual  alternating  of  the  currents 
of  the  moods  as  power  grows  more  effective. 
In  the  higher  states  of  power,  the  moods 
are  seen  alternating  with  increasing  heat  and 
swiftness  until  in  the  highest  state  of  power 
of  all,  they  are  seen  in  their  mutual  glow  and 
splendour,  working  as  one  mood,  creating 
miracles. 

The  orator  and  the  listener,  the  writer  and 
the  reader,  in  proportion  as  they  become  alive 
to  one  another,  come  into  the  same  spirit — the 
spirit  of  mutual  listening  and  utterance.  At 
the  very  best,  and  in  the  most  inspired  mood, 
the  reader  reads  as  if  he  were  a  reader  and 


Ubc 
Organic 
l^rinciple 

of  fn» 
epiration 


58 


Ube  CbilD  an&  Ube  JSooft 


Ube 
Organic 

Principle 
of  fna 

spiration 


writer  both,  and  the  writer  writes  as  if  he  were 
a  writer  and  reader  both. 

While  it  is  necessary  in  the  use  and  develop- 
ment of  power,  that  all  varieties  and  com- 
binations of  these  moods  should  be  familiar 
experiences  with  the  artist  and  with  the  reader 
of  the  artist,  it  remains  as  the  climax  and 
ideal  of  all  energy  and  beauty  in  the  human 
soul  that  these  moods  shall  be  found  alternat- 
ing very  swiftly  —  to  all  appearances  together. 
The  artist's  command  of  this  alternating  cur- 
rent, the  swiftness  with  which  he  modulates 
these  moods  into  one  another,  is  the  measure 
of  his  power.  The  violinist  who  plays  best  is 
the  one  who  sings  the  most  things  together  in 
his  playing.  He  listens  to  his  own  bow,  to 
the  heart  of  his  audience,  and  to  the  soul  of 
the  composer  all  at  once.  His  instrument 
sings  a  singing  that  blends  them  together. 
The  effect  of  their  being  together  is  called  art. 
The  effect  of  their  being  together  is  produced 
by  the  fact  that  they  are  together,  that  thej'- 
are  bom  and  living  and  dying  together  in  the 
man  himself  while  the  strings  are  singing  to 
us.  They  are  the  spirit  within  the  strings. 
His  letting  himself  go  to  them,  his  gathering 
himself  out  of  them,  his  power  to  receive  and 
create  at  once,  is  the  secret  of  the  effiect  he 
produces.  The  power  to  be  receptive  and 
creative  by  turns  is  only  obtained  by  constant 
and  daily  practice,  and  when  the  modulating 
of  one  of  these  moods  into  the  other  becomes  a 


Ebe  ©rganic  principle  ot  irnsptratton 


59 


swift  and  unconscious  habit  of  life,  what  is 
called  ' '  temperament "  in  an  artist  is  attained 
at  last  and  inspiration  is  a  daily  occurrence. 
It  is  as  hard  for  such  a  man  to  keep  from  being 
inspired  as  it  is  for  the  rest  of  us  to  make  our- 
selves inspired.  He  has  to  go  out  of  his  way 
to  avoid  inspiration. 

In  proportion  as  this  principle  is  recognised 
and  allowed  free  play  in  the  habits  that  obtain 
amongst  men  who  know  books,  their  habits 
will  be  inspired  habits.  Books  will  be  read 
and  lived  in  the  same  breath,  and  books  that 
have  been  lived  will  be  written. 

The  most  serious  menace  in  the  present 
epidemic  of  analysis  in  our  colleges  is  not  that 
it  is  teaching  men  to  analyse  masterpieces 
until  they  are  dead  to  them,  but  that  it  is 
teaching  men  to  analyse  their  own  lives  until 
they  are  dead  to  themselves.  When  the  pro- 
cess of  education  is  such  that  it  narrows  the 
area  of  unconscious  thinking  and  feeling  in  a 
man's  life,  it  cuts  him  off  from  his  kinship 
with  the  gods,  from  his  habit  of  being  uncon- 
scious enough  of  what  he  has  to  enter  into  the 
joy  of  what  he  has  not. 

The  best  that  can  be  said  of  such  an  education 
is  that  it  is  a  patient,  painstaking,  laborious 
training  in  locking  one's  self  up.  It  dooms  a 
man  to  himself,  the  smallest  part  of  himself, 
and  walls  him  out  of  the  universe.  He  comes 
to  its  doorways  one  by  one.  The  shining  of 
them  falls  at  first  on  him,  as  it  falls  on  all  of 


Ubc 
®rdanfc 
f>dnc{ple 

of  Itta 

spiratfon 


6o 


Zbc  Gblld  ant)  Ube  IBoofi 


Ubc 
©rganfc 
principle 

otHns 
epiration 


US.  He  sees  the  shining  of  them  and  hastens 
to  them.  One  by  one  they  are  shut  in  his 
face.  His  soul  is  damned  —  is  sentenced  to 
perpetual  consciousness  of  itself.  What  is 
there  that  he  can  do  next?  Turning  round 
and  round  inside  himself,  learning  how  little 
worth  while  it  is,  there  is  but  one  fate  left 
open  to  such  a  man,  a  blind  and  desperate 
lunge  into  the  roar  of  the  life  he  cannot  see, 
for  facts— the  usual  L.H.D.,  Ph.D.  fate.  If 
he  piles  around  him  the  huge  hollow  sounding 
outsides  of  things  in  the  universe  that  have 
lived,  bones  of  soul,  matter  of  bodies,  skeletons 
of  lives  that  men  have  lived,  who  shall  blame 
him  ?  He  wonders  why  they  have  lived,  why 
any  one  lives;  and  if,  when  he  has  wondered 
long  enough  why  any  one  lives,  we  choose  to 
make  him  the  teacher  of  the  young,  that  the 
young  also  may  wonder  why  any  one  lives, 
why  should  we  call  him  to  account  ?  He  can- 
not but  teach  what  he  has,  what  has  been 
given  him,  and  we  have  but  ourselves  to  thank 
that,  as  every  radiant  June  comes  round, 
diplomas  for  ennui  are  being  handed  out  — 
thousands  of  them  —  to  specially  favoured 
children  through  all  this  broad  and  glorious 
land. 


The  Fourth  Interference 
The  Habit  of  Analysis 


6i 


llf  Sbafteapeare  Came  to  Cbicago 

IT  is  one  of  the  supreme  literary  excellences 
of  the  Bible  that,  until  the  other  day  al- 
most, it  had  never  occurred  to  any  one  that  it 
is  literatare  at  all.  It  has  been  read  by  men 
and  women,  and  children  and  priests  and 
popes,  and  kings  and  slaves  and  the  dying 
of  all  ages,  and  it  has  come  to  them  not  as  a 
book,  but  as  if  it  were  something  happening  to 
them. 

It  has  come  to  them  as  nights  and  mornings 
come,  and  sleep  and  death,  as  one  of  the 
great,  simple,  infinite  experiences  of  human 
life.  It  has  been  the  habit  of  the  world  to  take 
the  greatest  works  of  art,  like  the  greatest 


-fff  Sbahe* 
speare 
Came  to 
Cbicago 


62 


Ube  CbiK)  anb  Ubc  Booft 


Vf  Sbahes 
speare 
Came  to 
Chicago 


workvS  of  God,  in  this  simple  and  straight- 
forward fashion,  as  great  experiences.  If  a 
masterpiece  really  is  a  masterpiece,  and  rains 
and  shines  its  instincts  on  us  as  masterpieces 
should,  we  do  not  think  whether  it  is  literary 
or  not,  any  more  than  we  gaze  on  mountains 
and  stop  to  think  how  sublimely  scientific, 
raptly  geological,  and  logically  chemical  they 
are.  These  things  are  true  about  mountains, 
and  have  their  place.  But  it  is  the  nature  of  a 
mountain  to  insist  upon  its  own  place — to  be 
an  experience  first  and  to  be  as  scientific  and 
geological  and  chemical  as  it  pleases  afterward. 
It  is  the  nature  of  anything  powerful  to  be  an 
experience  first  and  to  appeal  to  experience. 
When  we  have  time,  or  when  the  experience 
is  over,  a  mountain  or  a  masterpiece  can  be 
analysed — the  worst  part  of  it;  but  we  cannot 
make  a  masterpiece  by  analysing  it;  and  a 
mountain  has  never  been  appreciated  by  pound- 
ing it  into  trap,  quartz,  and  conglomerate;  and 
it  still  holds  good,  as  a  general  principle,  that 
making  a  man  appreciate  a  mountain  by  pound- 
ing it  takes  nearly  as  long  as  making  the 
mountain,  and  is  not  nearly  so  worth  while. 

Not  many  years  ago,  in  one  of  our  journals 
of  the  more  literary  sort,  there  appeared  a  few 
directions  from  Chicago  University  to  the  late 
John  Keats  on  how  to  write  an  *'  Ode  to  a 
Nightingale."  These  directions  were  from  the 
Head  of  a  Department,  who,  in  a  previous  paper 
in  the  same  journal,  had  rewritten  the  **  Ode  to 


irt  Sbaftespeare  Came  to  Cbtcaao 


63 


a  Grecian  Urn."  The  main  point  the  Head  of 
the  Department  made,  with  regard  to  the  night- 
ingale, was  that  it  was  not  worth  rewriting. 
v  *  The  Ode  to  the  Nightingale,'  "  says  he, 
"  offers  me  no  such  temptation.  There  is  al- 
most nothing  in  it  that  properly  belongs  to 
the  subject  treated.  The  faults  of  the  Grecian 
Urn  are  such  as  the  poet  himself,  under  wise 
criticism"  (see  catalogue  of  Chicago  Univer- 
sity) '*  might  easily  have  removed.  The  faults 
of  the  Nightingale  are  such  that  they  cannot 
be  removed.  They  inhere  in  the  idea  and 
structure."  The  Head  of  the  Department 
dwells  at  length  upon  "the  hopeless  fortune 
of  the  poem,"  expressing  his  regret  that  it  can 
never  be  retrieved.  After  duly  analysing  what 
he  considers  the  poem's  leading  thought,  he 
regrets  that  a  poet  like  John  Keats  should  go 
so  far,  apropos  of  a  nightingale,  as  to  sigh  in 
his  immortal  stanzas,  "for  something  which, 
whatever  it  may  be,  is  nothing  short  of  a  dead 
drunk." 

One  hears  the  soul  of  Keats  from  out  its 
eternal  Italy — 


speare 
Came  to 
Cbicaao 


"  Is  there  no  one  near  to  help  me  ? 

.     .    .    No  fair  dawn 
Of  life  from  charitable  voice?    No  sweet  saying 
To  set  my  dull  and  sadden'd  spirit  playing? " 


The  Head  of  the  Department  goes  on,  and  the 
lines — 


64 


Zbc  GbilD  anD  Zbc  JBooli 


tf  Sbafte« 
6peare 

Came  to 
Cbicago 


Still  wouldst  thou  sing  and  I  have  ears  in  vain — 
To  thy  high  requiem  become  a  sod — 

are  passed  through  analysis.  "  What  the  fit- 
ness is,"  he  says,  "  or  what  the  poetic  or  other 
effectiveness  of  suggesting  that  the  corpse  of  a 
person  who  has  ceased  upon  the  midnight  still 
has  ears,  only  to  add  that  it  has  them  in  vain,  I 
cannot  pretend  to  understand  " — one  of  a  great 
many  other  things  that  the  Head  of  the  De- 
partment does  not  pretend  to  understand.  It 
is  probably  with  the  same  outfit  of  not  pretend- 
ing to  understand  that — for  the  edification  of 
the  merely  admiring  mind  —  the  '  *  Ode  to  a 
Grecian  Urn"  was  rewritten.  To  Keats' s 
lines — 

Oh,  Attic  shape !    Fair  attitude  !  with  brede 

Of  marble  men  and  maidens  overwrought, 
With  forest  branches  and  the  trodden  weed  ; 

Thou,  silent  form,  dost  tease  us  out  of  thought 
As  doth  eternity  :  Cold  Pastoral ! 

When  old  age  shall  this  generation  waste. 
Thou  shalt  remain,  in  midst  of  other  woe 

Than  ours,  a  friend  to  man,  to  whom  thou  sayest, 
"  Beauty  is  truth,  truth  beauty  "—that  is  all 
Ye  know  on  earth,  and  all  ye  need  to  know — 

he  makes  various  corrections,  offering  as  a 
substitute-conclusion  to  the  poet's  song  the 
following  outburst : 

Preaching  this  wisdom  with  thy  cheerful  mien  : 

Possessing  beauty  thou  possessest  all ; 

Pause  at  that  goal,  nor  farther  push  thy  quest. 


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65 


It  would  not  be  just  to  the  present  state  of 
academic  instruction  in  literature  to  illustrate 
it  by  such  an  extreme  instance  as  this  of  the 
damage  the  educated  mind — debauched  with 
analysis — is  capable  of  doing  to  the  reading 
habit.  It  is  probable  that  a  large  proportion  of 
the  teachers  of  literature  in  the  United  States, 
both  out  of  their  sense  of  John  Keats  and  out 
of  respect  to  themselves,  would  have  publicly 
resented  this  astonishing  exhibit  of  the  ex- 
treme literary-academic  mind  in  a  prominent 
journal,  had  they  not  suspected  that  its  editor, 
having  discovered  a  literary-academic  mind 
that  could  take  itself  as  seriously  as  this,  had 
deliberately  brought  it  out  as  a  spectacle.  It 
could  do  no  harm  to  Keats,  certainly,  or  to  any 
one  else,  and  would  afford  an  infinite  deal  of 
amusement — the  journal  argued — to  let  a  mind 
like  this  clatter  down  a  column  to  oblivion. 
So  it  did.  It  was  taken  by  all  concerned, 
teachers,  critics,  and  observers  alike,  as  one 
of  the  more  interesting  literary  events  of  the 
season. 

Unfortunately,  however,  entertainments  of 
this  kind  have  a  very  serious  side  to  them.  It 
is  one  thing  to  smile  at  an  individual  when  one 
knows  that  standing  where  he  does  he  stands 
by  himself,  and  another  to  smile  at  an  indi- 
vidual when  one  knows  that  he  is  not  standing 
by  himself,  that  he  is  a  type,  that  there  must 
be  a  great  many  others  like  him  or  he  would 
not  be  standing  where  he  does  at  all.     When 


If  SbaP?e8 

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XTbe  Cbflb  anb  XTbe  IBooft 


speare 
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a  human  being  is  seen  taking  his  stand  over 
his  own  soul  in  public  print,  summing  up  its 
emptiness  there,  and  gloating  over  it,  we  are 
in  the  presence  of  a  disheartening  fact.  It  can 
be  covered  up,  however,  and  in  what,  on  the 
whole,  is  such  a  fine,  true-ringing,  hearty  old 
world  as  this,  it  need  not  be  made  much  of; 
but  when  we  find  that  a  mind  like  this  has 
been  placed  at  the  head  of  a  Department  of 
Poetry  in  a  great,  representative  American 
university,  the  last  thing  that  should  be  done 
with  it  is  to  cover  it  up.  The  more  people 
know  where  the  analytical  mind  is  to-day — 
where  it  is  getting  to  be — and  the  more  they 
think  what  its  being  there  means,  the  better. 
The  signs  of  the  times,  the  destiny  of  educa- 
tion, and  the  fate  of  literature  are  all  involved 
in  a  fact  like  this.  The  mere  possibility  of 
having  the  analysing-grinding  mind  engaged 
in  teaching  a  spontaneous  art  in  a  great  educa- 
tional institution  would  be  of  great  significance. 
The  fact  that  it  is  actually  there  and  that  no 
particular  comment  is  excited  by  its  being 
there,  is  significant.  It  betrays  not  only  what 
the  general,  national,  academic  attitude  toward 
literature  is,  but  that  that  attitude  has  become 
habitual,  that  it  is  taken  for  granted. 

One  would  be  inclined  to  suppose,  looking 
at  the  matter  abstractly,  that  all  students  and 
teachers  of  literature  would  take  it  for  granted 
that  the  practice  of  making  a  dispassionate 
criticism  of  a  passion  would  be  a  dangerous 


Vf  Sbabespeare  dame  to  dbicago 


67 


practice  for  any  vital  and  spontaneous  nature 
— certainly  the  last  kind  of  practice  that  a 
student  of  the  art  of  poetry  (that  is,  the  art  of 
literature,  in  the  essential  sense)  would  wish 
to  make  himself  master  of.  The  first  item  in 
a  critic's  outfit  for  criticising  a  passion  is  hav- 
ing one.  The  fact  that  this  is  not  regarded  as 
an  axiom  in  our  current  education  in  books  is 
a  very  significant  fact.  It  goes  with  another 
significant  fact  —  the  assumption,  in  most 
courses  of  literature  as  at  present  conducted, 
that  a  little  man  (that  is,  a  man  incapable  of  a 
great  passion),  who  is  not  even  able  to  read  a 
book  with  a  great  passion  in  it,  can  somehow 
teach  other  people  to  read  it. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  deny  that  analysis  oc- 
casionally plays  a  valuable  part  in  bringing  a 
pupil  to  a  true  method  and  knowledge  of 
literature,  but  unless  the  analysis  is  inspired 
nothing  can  be  more  dangerous  to  a  pupil  under 
his  thirtieth  year,  even  for  the  shortest  period 
of  time,  or  more  likely  to  move  him  over  to  the 
farthest  confines  of  the  creative  life,  or  more 
certain,  if  continued  long  enough,  to  set  him 
forever  outside  all  power  or  possibility  of  power, 
either  in  the  art  of  literature  or  in  any  of  the 
other  arts. 

The  first  objection  to  the  analysis  of  one  of 
Shakespeare's  plays  as  ordinarily  practised  in 
courses  of  literature  is  that  it  is  of  doubtful 
value  to  nine  hundred  and  ninety-nine  pupils 
in  a  thousand — if  they  do  it.     The  second  is, 


If  Sbaliea 
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TLbc  Cbfl^  anD  TLbc  JBooft 


ffSbakea 
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that  they  cannot  do  it.  The  analysing  of  one 
of  Shakespeare's  plays  requires  more  of  a 
commonplace  pupil  than  Shakespeare  required 
of  himself.  The  apology  that  is  given  for  the 
analysing  method  is,  that  the  process  of  analys- 
ing a  work  of  Shakespeare's  will  show  the  pupil 
how  Shakespeare  did  it,  and  that  by  seeing 
how  Shakespeare  did  it  he  will  see  how  to  do 
it  himself. 

In  the  first  place,  analysis  will  not  show  how 
Shakespeare  did  it,  and  in  the  second  place,  if 
it  does,  it  will  show  that  he  did  not  do  it  by 
analysis.  In  the  third  place, — to  say  nothing 
of  not  doing  it  by  analysis, — if  he  had  analysed 
it  before  he  did  it,  he  could  not  have  analysed 
it  afterward  in  the  literal  and  modern  sense.  In 
the  fourth  place,  even  if  Shakespeare  were  able 
to  do  his  work  by  analysing  it  before  he  did  it,  it 
does  not  follow  that  undergraduate  students  can. 

A  man  of  genius,  with  all  his  onset  of  natural 
passion,  his  natural  power  of  letting  himself 
go,  could  doubtless  do  more  analysing,  both 
before  and  after  his  work,  than  any  one  else 
without  being  damaged  by  it.  What  shall  be 
said  of  the  folly  of  trying  to  teach  men  of 
talent,  and  the  mere  pupils  of  men  of  talent, 
by  analysis — by  a  method,  that  is,  which,  even 
if  it  succeeds  in  doing  what  it  tries  to  do,  can 
only,  at  the  very  best,  reveal  to  the  pupil  the 
roots  of  his  instincts  before  they  have  come 
up?  And  why  is  it  that  our  courses  of  litera- 
ture may  be  seen  assuming  to-day  on  every 


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hand,  almost  without  exception,  that  by  teach- 
ing men  to  analyse  their  own  inspirations — the 
inspirations  they  have — and  teaching  them  to 
analyse  the  inspirations  of  other  men — inspira- 
tions they  can  never  have — we  are  somehow 
teaching  them  *'  English  literature  "  ? 

It  seems  to  have  been  overlooked  while  we 
are  all  analytically  falling  at  Shakespeare's 
feet,  that  Shakespeare  did  not  become  Shake- 
speare by  analytically  falling  at  any  one's  feet 
— not  even  at  his  own — and  that  the  most  im- 
portant difierence  between  being  a  Shakespeare 
and  being  an  analyser  of  Shakespeare  is  that 
with  the  man  Shakespeare  no  submitting  of 
himself  to  the  analysis-gymnast  would  ever 
have  been  possible,  and  with  the  students  of 
Shakespeare  (as  students  go  and  if  they  are 
caught  young  enough)  the  habit  of  analysis  is 
not  only  a  possibility  but  a  sleek,  industrious, 
and  complacent  certainty. 

After  a  little  furtive  looking  backward  per- 
haps, and  a  few  tremblings  and  doubts,  they 
shall  all  be  seen,  almost  to  a  man,  offering 
their  souls  to  Moloch,  as  though  the  not  hav- 
ing a  soul  and  not  missing  it  were  the  one  final 
and  consummate  triumph  that  literary  culture 
could  bring.  Flocks  of  them  can  be  seen  with 
the  shining  in  their  faces  year  after  year,  term 
after  term,  almost  anywhere  on  the  civilised 
globe,  doing  this  very  thing — doing  it  under 
the  impression  that  they  are  learning  some- 
thing, and  not  until  the  shining  in  their  faces 


If  Sbalte« 

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Ube  Cbm  auD  Ube  3Booft 


Hf  Sbaftes 
epeace 
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is  gone  will  they  be  under  the  impression  that 
they  have  learned  it  (whatever  it  is)  and  that 
they  are  educated. 

The  fact  that  the  analytic  mind  is  establish- 
ing itself,  in  a  greater  or  less  degree,  as  the 
sentinel  in  college  life  of  the  entire  creative 
literature  of  the  world  is  a  fact  with  many 
meanings  in  it.  It  means  not  only  that  there 
are  a  great  many  more  minds  like  it  in  litera- 
ture, but  that  a  great  many  other  minds — 
nearly  all  college-educated  minds — are  being 
made  like  it.  It  means  that  unless  the  danger 
is  promptly  faced  and  acted  upon  the  next 
generation  of  American  citizens  can  neither 
expect  to  be  able  to  produce  literature  of  its 
own  nor  to  appreciate  or  enjoy  literature  that 
has  been  produced.  It  means  that  another 
eighteenth  century  is  coming  to  the  world; 
and,  as  the  analysis  is  deeper  than  before  and 
more  deadly-clever  with  the  deeper  things  than 
before,  it  is  going  to  be  the  longest  eighteenth 
century  the  world  has  ever  seen — generations 
with  machines  for  hands  and  feet,  machines 
for  minds,  machines  outside  their  minds  to  en- 
joy the  machines  inside  their  minds  with. 
Every  man  with  his  information-machine  to  be 
cultured  with,  his  religious  machine  to  be  good 
with,  and  his  private  Analysis  Machine  to  be 
beautiful  with,  shall  take  his  place  in  the 
world — shall  add  his  soul  to  the  Machine  we 
make  a  world  with.  For  every  man  that  is 
born  on  the  earth  one  more  joy  shall  be  crowded 


•fft  Sbaftespeare  Came  to  CbtcaGo 


71 


out  of  it — one  more  analysis  of  joy  shall  take 
its  place,  go  round  and  round  under  the  stars 
— dew,  dawn,  and  darkness — until  it  stops. 
How  a  sunrise  is  made  and  why  a  cloud  is 
artistic  and  how  pines  should  be  composed  in 
a  landscape,  all  men  shall  know.  We  shall 
criticise  the  technique  of  thunderstorms.  '  *  And 
what  is  a  sunset  after  all  ?  "  The  reflection  of 
a  large  body  on  rarefied  air.  Through  analysed 
heaven  and  over  analysed  fields  it  trails  its 
joylessness  around  the  earth. 

Time  was,  when  the  setting  of  the  sun  was 
the  playing  of  two  worlds  upon  a  human  be- 
ing's life  on  the  edge  of  the  little  day,  the 
blending  of  sense  and  spirit  for  him,  earth  and 
heaven,  out  in  the  still  west.  His  whole  being 
went  forth  to  it.  He  watched  with  it  and 
prayed  and  sang  with  it.  In  its  presence  his 
soul  walked  down  to  the  stars.  Out  of  the  joy 
of  his  life,  the  finite  sorrow  and  the  struggle  of 
his  life,  he  gazed  upon  it.  It  was  the  portrait 
of  his  infinite  self.  Kvery  setting  sun  that 
came  to  him  was  a  compact  with  Kternal  Joy. 
The  Night  itself — his  figure  faint  before  it  in 
the  flicker  of  the  east  —  whispered  to  him: 
*  *  Thou  also — hills  and  heavens  around  thee, 
hills  and  heavens  within  thee — oh.  Child  of 
Time— Thou  also  art  God!  " 

* '  Ah  me !  How  I  could  love !  My  soul  doth 
melt,"  cries  Keats: 

Ye  deaf  and  senseless  minutes  of  the  day. 
And  thou  old  forest,  hold  ye  this  for  true, 


Vt  Sbaites 

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Ubc  CbtlD  anb  XCbe  IBooft 


Bnal?8(0  There  is  no  lightning,  no  authentic  dew 

BnalBseJ)  But  in  the  eye  of  love ;  there 's  not  a  sound, 

Melodious  howsoever,  can  confound 
The  heavens  and  the  earth  to  such  a  death 
As  doth  the  voice  of  love  ;  there  's  not  a  breath 
Will  mingle  kindly  with  the  meadow  air. 
Till  it  has  panted  round,  and  stolen  a  share 
Of  passion  from  the  heart. 

John  Keats  and  William  Shakespeare  wrote 
masterpieces  because  they  had  passions,  spirit- 
ual experiences,  and  the  daily  habit  of  inspira- 
tion. In  so  far  as  these  masterpieces  are  being 
truthfully  taught,  they  are  taught  by  teachers 
who  themselves  know  the  passion  of  creation. 
They  teach  John  Keats  and  William  Shake- 
speare by  rousing  the  same  passions  and  ex- 
periences in  the  pupil  that  Keats  and  Shake- 
speare had,  and  by  daily  appealing  to  them. 


II 


There  are  a  great  many  men  in  the  world  to- 
day, faithfully  doing  their  stint  in  it  (they  are 
commonly  known  as  men  of  talent),  who  would 
have  been  men  of  genius  if  they  had  dared. 
Education  has  made  cowards  of  us  all,  and  the 
habit  of  examining  the  roots  of  one's  instincts, 
before  they  come  up,  is  an  incurable  habit. 

The  essential  principle  in  a  true  work  of  art 
is  always  the  poem  or  the  song  that  is  hidden 


Hnalpsts  Unal^sc^ 


73 


in  it.  A  work  of  art  by  a  man  of  talent  is 
generally  ranked  by  the  fact  that  it  is  the 
work  of  a  man  who  analyses  a  song  before 
he  sings  it.  He  puts  down  the  words  of  the 
song  first — writes  it,  that  is — in  prose.  Then 
he  lumbers  it  over  into  poetry.  Then  he 
looks  around  for  some  music  for  it.  Then  he 
practises  at  singing  it,  and  then  he  sings  it. 
The  man  of  genius,  on  the  other  hand,  whether 
he  be  a  great  one  or  a  very  little  one,  is  known 
by  the  fact  that  he  has  a  song  sent  to  him. 
He  sings  it.  He  has  a  habit  of  humming  it 
over  afterwards.  His  humming  it  over  after- 
wards is  his  analysis.  It  is  the  only  possible 
inspired  analysis. 

The  diiGference  between  these  two  types  of 
men  is  so  great  that  anything  that  the  smaller 
of  them  has  to  say  about  the  spirit  or  the  pro- 
cesses of  the  other  is  of  little  value.  When 
one  of  them  tries  to  teach  the  work  of  the 
other,  which  is  what  almost  always  occurs, — 
the  man  of  talent  being  the  typical  profes- 
sor of  works  of  genius, — the  result  is  fatal. 
A  singer  who  is  so  little  capable  of  singing  that 
he  can  give  a  prose  analysis  of  his  own  song 
while  it  is  coming  to  him  and  before  he  sings 
it,  can  hardly  be  expected  to  extemporise  an 
inspired  analysis  of  another  man's  song  after 
reading  it.  If  a  man  cannot  apply  inspired 
analysis  to  a  little  common  passion  in  a  song 
he  has  of  his  own,  he  is  placed  in  a  hopeless 
position  when  he  tries  to  give  an  inspired 


Bnal^sis 
Bnals0e& 


74 


Ubc  CbilO  nnb  Ubc  Booft 


analysis  of  a  passion  that  only  another  man 
could  have  and  that  only  a  great  man  would 
forget  himself  long  enough  to  have.     ^^^  >ii07/ 

An  inspired  analysis  may  be  defined  as  the 
kind  of  analysis  that  the  real  poet  in  his  crea- 
tively critical  mood  is  able  to  give  to  his  work 
—a  low-singing  or  humming  analysis  in  which 
all  the  elements  of  the  song  are  active  and  all 
the  faculties  and  all  the  senseis  work  on  the 
subject  at  once.  The  proportions  and  relations 
of  a  living  thing  are  all  kept  perfect  in  an  in- 
spired analysis,  and  the  song  is  made  perfect 
at  last,  not  by  being  taken  apart,  but  by  being 
made  to  pass  its  delight  more  deeply  and  more 
slowly  through  the  singer's  utmost  self  to  its 
fulfilment. 

What  is  ordinarily  taught  as  analysis  is  very 
different  from  this.  It  consists  in  the  deliber^ 
ate  and  triumphant  separation  of  the  faculties 
from  one  another  and  from  the  thing  they  have 
produced— the  dull,  bare,  pitiless  process  of 
passing  a  living  and  beautiful  thing  before  one 
vacant,  staring  faculty  at  a  time.  This  faculty, 
being  left  in  the  stupor  of  being  all  by  itself, 
sits  in  complacent  judgment  upon  a  work  of 
art,  the  very  essence  of  the  life  and  beauty  of 
which  is  its  appealing  to  all  of  the  faculties 
and  senses  at  once,  in  their  true  proportion, 
glowing  them  together  into  a  unit — namely,^ 
several  things  made  into  one  thing,  that  is— 
several  things  occupying  the  same  time  and 
the  same  place,  that  is— synthesis.      An  in- 


e|r^.;|lnal»9is  Hnali^Beb  j;^ 


75 


spired  analysis  is  the  rehearsal  of  a  synthesis. 
An  analysis  is  not  inspired  unless  it  comes  as 
a  flash  of  light  and  a  burst  of  niiisic  and  a 
bte^th  of  fragrance  all  in  one.  Such  an  ^^aIy- 
§i^Jf;annot  be  secured  with  painstaking  an^ 
slowness,  unless  the  painstaking  and  slowness 
are  the  rehearsal  of  a  synthesis,  and  all  the 
elements  in  it  are  laboured  on  and  delighted  in 
at  once.  It  must  be  aiipw:^^ngi;ig  ,Qrv.h]^- 
miug  analysis.  ,  .,,  ,  -.j^ij,,,  -uU  V-  vf^-r 

;  (The  expert  student  or  teacher  of  poetry  who 
niakes  **a  dispassionate  criticism  "  of  a  passion, 
who  makes  it  his  special  boast  that  he  is  able 
to  apply  his  intellect  severely  by  itself  to  a 
great  poem,  boasts  of  the  devastation  of  the 
highest  power  a  human  being  can  attain.  The 
commonest  man  that  lives,  whatever  his  powers 
may  be,  if  they  are  powers  that  act  together, 
can  look  down  on  a  man  whose  powers  cannot, 
as  a  mutilated  being.  While  it  cannot  be  de- 
nied that  a  being  who  has  been  thus  especially 
mutilated  is  often  possessed  of  a  certain  literary 
ability,  he  belongs  to  the  acrobats  of  literature 
rather  than  to  literature  itself.  The  contor- 
tionist who  separates  himself  from  his  ha»d& 
and  feet  for  the  delectation  of  audiences,  the 
circus  performer  who  makes  a  battering-ram  of 
his  head  and  who  glories  in  being  shot  out  of  a 
cannon  into  space  and  amazement,  goes  through 
his  motions  with  essentially  the  same  pride  in 
his  strength,  and  sustains  the  same  relation  to 
the  strength  of  the  real  man  of  the  world. 


Bnals0is 


76 


TLbc  CbiU>  an^  XTbe  3Booft 


Hnal^sis 
Bnaligseb 


Whatever  a  course  of  literary  criticism  may- 
be, or  its  value  may  be,  to  the  pupils  who  take 
it,  it  consists,  more  often  than  not,  on  the  part 
of  pupil  and  teacher  both,  in  the  dislocating  of 
one  faculty  from  all  the  others,  and  the  bearing 
it  down  hard  on  a  work  of  art,  as  if  what  it  was 
made  of,  or  how  it  was  made,  could  only  be 
seen  by  scratching  it. 

It  is  to  be  expected  now  and  then,  in  the 
hurry  of  the  outside  world,  that  a  newspaper 
critic  will  be  found  writing  a  cerebellum  criti- 
cism of  a  work  of  the  imagination;  but  the 
student  of  literature,  in  the  comparative  quiet 
and  leisure  of  the  college  atmosphere,  who 
works  in  the  same  separated  spirit,  who  esti- 
mates a  work  by  dislocating  his  faculties  on  it, 
is  infinitely  more  blameworthy;  and  the  col- 
lege teacher  who  teaches  a  work  of  genius  by 
causing  it  to  file  before  one  of  his  faculties  at  a 
time,  when  all  of  them  would  not  be  enough, — 
who  does  this  in  the  presence  of  young  persons 
and  trains  them  to  do  it  themselves, — is  a  public 
menace.  The  attempt  to  master  a  masterpiece, 
as  it  were,  by  reading  it  first  with  the  sense  of 
sight,  and  then  with  the  sense  of  smell,  and 
with  all  the  senses  in  turn,  keeping  them  care- 
fully guarded  from  their  habit  of  sensing  things 
together,  is  not  only  a  self-destructive  but  a 
hopeless  attempt.  A  great  mind,  even  if  it 
would  attempt  to  master  anything  in  this  way, 
would  find  it  hopeless,  and  the  attempt  to 
learn  a  great  work  of  art — a  great  whole — by 


Hnaligsts  Hnalpeet) 


77 


applying  the  small  parts  of  a  small  mind  to  it, 
one  after  the  other,  is  more  hopeless  still.  It 
can  be  put  down  as  a  general  principle  that  a 
human  being  who  is  so  little  alive  that  he  finds 
his  main  pleasure  in  life  in  taking  himself 
apart,  can  find  little  of  value  for  others  in  a 
masterpiece — a  work  of  art  which  is  so  much 
alive  that  it  cannot  be  taken  apart,  and  which 
is  eternal  because  its  secret  is  eternally  its 
own.  If  the  time  ever  comes  when  it  can 
be  taken  apart,  it  will  be  done  only  by  a  man 
who  could  have  put  it  together,  who  is  more 
alive  than  the  masterpiece  is  alive.  Until  the 
masterpiece  meets  with  a  master  who  is  more 
creative  than  its  first  master  was,  the  less  the 
motions  of  analysis  are  gone  through  with  by 
those  who  are  not  masters,  the  better.  A 
masterpiece  cannot  be  analysed  by  the  cold  and 
negative  process  of  being  taken  apart.  It  can 
only  be  analysed  by  being  melted  down.  It 
can  only  be  melted  down  by  a  man  who  has 
creative  heat  in  him  to  melt  it  down  and  the 
daily  habit  of  glowing  with  creative  heat. 

It  is  a  matter  of  common  observation  that 
the  fewer  resources  an  artist  has,  the  more 
things  there  are  in  nature  and  in  the  nature 
of  life  which  he  thinks  are  not  beautiful.  The 
making  of  an  artist  is  his  sense  of  selection. 
If  he  is  an  artist  of  the  smaller  type,  he  selects 
beautiful  subjects — subjects  with  ready-made 
beauty  in  them.  If  he  is  an  artist  of  the  larger 
type,  he  can  hardly  miss  making  almost  any 


Bnal^sed 


78 


UbeCbflJ)  anD  Xlbe  Booft 


Bnal)28ed 


subject  beautiful,  because  he  has  so  many 
beautiful  things  to  put  it  with.  He  sees  every 
subject  the  way  it  is — that  is,  in  relation  to  a 
great  many  other  subjects — the  way  God  saw 
it,  when  He  made  it,  and  the  way  it  is. 

The  essential  diflference  between  a  small 
mood  and  a  large  one  is  that  in  the  small  one 
we  see  each  thing  we  look  on,  comparatively 
by  itself,  or  with  reference  to  one  or  two  rela- 
tions to  persons  and  events.  In  our  larger 
n;ood  we  see  it  less  analytically.  We  see  it  as 
it  is  and  as  it  lives  and  as  a  god  would  see  it, 
playing  its  meaning  through  tjtiejp;^oJb|_, 9^^);^ 
scheme  into  everything  else. ^.^.^^^j^  ^omnis^HRm 

The  soul  of  beauty  is  synthesis.  In  the 
presence  of  a  mountain  the  sound  of  a  hammer 
is  as  rich  as  a  symphony.  It  is  like  the  little 
word  of  a  great  man,  great  in  its  great  relations. 
When  the  spirit  is  waked  and  the  man  within 
the  man  is  listening  to  it,  the  sound  of  a  hoof 
on  a  lonely  road  in  the  great  woods  is  the 
footstep  of  cities  to  him  coming  through  the 
trees,  and  the  low,  chocking  sound  of  a  cart- 
wheel in  the  still  and  radiant  valley  throngs 
his  being  like  an  opera.  All  sights  and  echoes 
and  thoughts  and  feelings  revel  in  it.  It  is 
music  for  the  smoke,  rapt  and  beautiful,  rising 
from  the  chimneys  at  his  feet.  A  sheet  of  water 
— making  heaven  out  of  nothing  —  is  beautiful 
to  the  dullest  man,  because  he  cannot  analyse  it, 
could  not — even  if  he  would — contrive  to  see  it 
by  itself.     Skies  come  crowding  on^  it.  ^  There 


Hnal^sis  HnalpseD 


79 


is  enough  poetry  in  the  mere  angle  of  a  sinking 
sun  to  flood  the  prose  of  a  continent  with,  be- 
cause the  gentle  earthlong  shadows  that  follow 
it  lay  their  fingers  upon  all  life  and  creep  to- 
gether innumerable  separated  things. 

In  the  meadow  where  our  birds  are  there  is 
scarcely  a  tree  in  sight  to  tangle  the  singing  in. 
It  is  a  meadow  with  miles  of  sunlight  in  it.  It; 
seems  like  a  kind  of  world-melody  to  walk  tn  the 
height  of  noon  there  —  infinite  grass,  infinite 
sky,  gusts  of  bobolinks'  voices— it 's  as  if  the  air 
that  drifted  down  made  music  of  itself;  and  the 
song  of  all  the  singing  everywhere — the  song 
the  soul  hears — comes  on  the  slow  winds. 

Half  the  delight  of  a  bobolink  is  that  he  is 
more  synthetic,  more  of  a  poet,  than  other 
birds, — has  a  duet  in  his  throat.  He  bursts 
from  the  grass  and  sings  in  bursts — plays  his 
own  obligato  while  he  goes.  One  can  never 
see'^iii('fnKis  eager  flurry,  between  his  lov^ 
heaven  and  his  low  nest,  without  catching  the 
lilt  of  inspiration.  lyike  the  true  poet,  he  suits 
the  action  to  tlie  word  in  a  weary  world,  and 
does  his  flying  and  singing  together.  The  song 
that  he  throws  around  him,  is  the  very  spirit  of 
his'wings— of  all  wings.  More  beauty  is  always 
the  putting  of  more  things  together.  They 
were  created  to  be  together.  The  spirit  of  art 
is  the  spirit  that  finds  this  out.  Even  the 
bobolink  is  cosmic,  if  he  sings  with  rboiBL 
enough;  and  when  the  heart  wakes,  the  song  df" 
the  cricket  is  infinite.     We  hear  it  across  stars. 


Bnals0e^ 


8o 


The   Fifth   Interference  : 
Literary  Drill  in  College 


&cc^8  and 
3Blo00omd 


See^6  anb  Bloeaome 

FOUR  men  stood  before  God  at  the  end  of 
The  First  Week,  watching  Him  whirl 
His  little  globe.*  The  first  man  said  to  Him, 
**  Tell  me  how  you  did  it."  The  second  man 
said,  *'  Let  me  have  it."  The  third  man  said, 
"  What  is  it  for  ?  "  The  fourth  man  said  no- 
thing, and  fell  down  and  worshipped.  Having 
worshipped  he  rose  to  his  feet  and  made  a 
world  himself. 

These  four  men  have  been  known  in  history 
as  the  Scientist,  the  Man  of  AflFairs,  the  Phi- 
losopher, and  the  Artist.  They  stand  for  the 
four  necessary  points  of  view  in  reading  books. 

*  Recently  discovered  manuscript. 


See^s  an^  Blossoms 


8i 


Most  of  the  readers  of  the  world  are  content 
to  be  partitioned  off,  and  having  been  duly  set 
down  for  life  in  one  or  the  other  of  these  four 
divisions  of  human  nature  they  take  sides 
from  beginning  to  end  with  one  or  the  other 
of  these  four  men.  It  is  the  distinction  of  the 
scholar  of  the  highest  class  in  every  period, 
that  he  declines  to  do  this.  In  so  far  as  he 
finds  each  of  the  four  men  taking  sides  against 
each  other,  he  takes  sides  against  each  of  them 
in  behalf  of  all.  He  insists  on  being  able  to 
absorb  knowledge,  to  read  and  write  in  all  four 
ways.  If  he  is  a  man  of  genius  as  well  as  a 
scholar,  he  insists  on  being  able  to  read  and 
write,  as  a  rule,  in  all  four  ways  at  once ;  if  his 
genius  is  of  the  lesser  kind,  in  two  or  three  ways 
at  once.  The  eternal  books  are  those  that 
stand  this  four-sided  test.  They  are  written 
from  all  of  these  points  of  view.  They  have 
absorbed  into  themselves  the  four  moods  of 
creation  morning.  It  is  thus  that  they  bring 
the  morning  back  to  us. 

The  most  important  question  in  regard  to 
books  that  our  schools  and  institutions  of 
learning  are  obliged  to  face  at  present  is, 
•'  How  shall  we  produce  conditions  that  will 
enable  the  ordinary  man  to  keep  the  propor- 
tions that  belong  to  a  man,  to  absorb  know- 
ledge, to  do  his  reading  and  writing  in  all  four 
ways  at  once  ?  "  In  other  words,  How  shall 
we  enable  him  to  be  a  natural  man,  a  man  of 
genius  as  far  as  he  goes  ? 


&ct6e  and 


82 


XTbe  CbtlD  auD  Ube  JBooft 


Seeds  and 
£Io00om0 


A  masterpiece  is  a  book  that  can  only  be 
read  by  a  man  who  is  a  master  in  some  degree 
of  the  things  the  book  is  master  of.  The  man 
who  has  mastered  things  the  most  is  the  man 
who  can  make  those  things.  The  man  who 
makes  things  is  the  artist.  He  has  bowed 
down  and  worshipped  and  he  has  arisen  and 
stood  before  God  and  created  before  Him,  and 
the  spirit  of  the  Creator  is  in  him.  To  take 
the  artist's  point  of  view,  is  to  take  the  point 
of  view  that  absorbs  and  sums  up  the  others. 
The  supremacy  and  comprehensiveness  of  this 
point  of  view  is  a  matter  of  fact  rather  than 
argument.  The  artist  is  the  man  who  makes 
the  things  that  Science  and  Practical  Affairs 
and  Philosophy  are  merely  about.  The  artist 
of  the  higher  order  is  more  scientific  than  the 
scientist,  more  practical  than  the  man  of 
affairs,  and  more  philosophic  than  the  philoso- 
pher, because  he  combines  what  these  men  do 
about  things,  and  what  these  men  say  about 
things,  into  the  things  themselves,  and  makes 
the  things  live. 

To  combine  these  four  moods  at  once  in 
one's  attitude  toward  an  idea  is  to  take  the 
artist's — that  is,  the  creative — point  of  view  to- 
ward it.  The  only  fundamental  outfit  a  man 
can  have  for  reading  books  in  all  four  ways 
at  once  is  his  ability  to  take  the  point  of  view 
of  the  man  who  made  the  book  in  all  four 
ways  at  once,  and  feel  the  way  he  felt  when  he 
made  it. 


See5s  anO  aBlossoms 


83 


The  organs  that  appreciate  literature  are  the 
organs  that  made  it.  True  reading  is  latent 
writing.  The  more  one  feels  like  writing  a 
book  when  he  reads  it  the  more  alive  his  read- 
ing is  and  the  more  alive  the  book  is. 

The  measure  of  culture  is  its  originating  and 
reproductive  capacity,  the  amount  of  seed  and 
blossom  there  is  in  it,  the  amount  it  can  afiford 
to  throw  away,  and  secure  divine  results.  Un- 
less the  culture  in  books  we  are  taking  such 
national  pains  to  acquire  in  the  present  genera- 
tion can  be  said  to  have  this  pollen  quality  in 
it,  unless  it  is  contagious,  can  be  summed  up 
in  its  pollen  and  transmitted,  unless  it  is  no- 
thing more  or  less  than  life  itself  made  catch- 
ing, unless,  like  all  else  that  is  allowed  to  have 
rights  in  nature,  it  has  powers  also,  has  an 
almost  infinite  power  of  self-multiplication, 
self-perpetuation,  the  more  cultured  we  are 
the  more  emasculated  we  are.  The  vegetables 
of  the  earth  and  the  flowers  of  the  field — the 
very  codfish  of  the  sea  become  our  superiors. 
What  is  more  to  the  point,  in  the  minds  and 
interests  of  all  living  human  beings,  their 
culture  crowds  ours  out. 

Nature  may  be  somewhat  coarse  and  simple- 
minded  and  naive,  but  reproduction  is  her  main 
point  and  she  never  misses  it.  Her  prejudice 
against  dead  things  is  immutable.  If  a  man 
objects  to  this  prejudice  against  dead  things, 
his  only  way  of  making  himself  count  is  to  die. 
Nature  uses  such  men  over  again,  makes  them 


See^s  and 
SBIossoms 


84 


TLbc  Cbil^  an^  Zbc  IBooft 


Seeb0  and 
3BIo00om0 


into  something  more  worth  while,  something 
terribly  or  beautifully  alive, — and  goes  on  her 
way. 

If  this  principle — namely,  that  the  repro- 
ductive power  of  culture  is  the  measure  of  its 
value — were  as  fully  introduced  and  recognised 
in  the  world  of  books  as  it  is  in  the  world  of 
commerce  and  in  the  natural  world,  it  would 
revolutionise  from  top  to  bottom,  and  from 
entrance  examination  to  diploma,  the  entire 
course  of  study,  policy,  and  spirit  of  most  of 
our  educational  institutions.  Allowing  for 
exceptions  in  every  faculty — memorable  to  all 
of  us  who  have  been  college  students, — it  would 
require  a  new  corps  of  teachers. 

Entrance  examinations  for  pupils  and 
teachers  alike  would  determine  two  points. 
First,  what  does  this  person  know  about 
things  ?  Second,  what  is  the  condition  of  his 
organs — what  can  he  do  with  them  ?  If  the 
privilege  of  being  a  pupil  in  the  standard  col- 
lege were  conditioned  strictly  upon  the  second 
of  these  questions — the  condition  of  his  organs 
— as  well  as  upon  the  first,  fifty  out  of  a  hund- 
red pupils,  as  prepared  at  present,  would  fall 
short  of  admission.  If  the  same  test  were  ap- 
plied for  admission  to  the  faculty,  ninety  out 
of  a  hundred  teachers  would  fall  short  of  ad- 
mission. Having  had  analytic,  self-destruc- 
tive, learned  habits  for  a  longer  time  than 
their  pupils,  the  condition  of  their  organs  is 
more  hopeless. 


See^s  ant)  Blossoms 


85 


The  man  who  has  the  greatest  joy  in  a  sym- 
phony is: 

First,  the  man  who  composes  it. 

Second,  the  conductor. 

Third,  the  performers. 

Fourth,  those  who  might  be  composers  of 
such  music  themselves. 

Fifth,  those  in  the  audience  who  have  been 
performers. 

Sixth,  those  who  are  going  to  be. 

Seventh,  those  who  are  composers  of  such 
music  for  other  instruments. 

Eighth,  those  who  are  composers  of  music  in 
other  arts — literature,  painting,  sculpture,  and 
architecture. 

Ninth,  those  who  are  performers  of  music  on 
other  instruments. 

Tenth,  those  who  are  performers  of  music  in 
other  arts. 

Eleventh,  those  who  are  creators  of  music 
with  their  own  lives. 

Twelfth,  those  who  perform  and  interpret  in 
their  own  lives  the  music  they  hear  in  other 
lives. 

Thirteenth,  those  who  create  anything  what- 
ever and  who  love  perfection  in  it. 

Fourteenth,  '*  The  Public." 

Fifteenth,  the  Professional  Critic  —  almost 
inevitably  at  the  fifteenth  remove  from  the 
heart  of  things  because  he  is  the  least  creative, 
unless  he  is  a  man  of  genius,  or  has  pluck  and 
talent  enough  to  work  his  way  through  the 


Sce&0  an^ 
3Blossom0 


86 


Ubc  Gbilb  anb  XTbe  Booft 


private 

1Roa^: 

Bangerous 


other  fourteen  moods  and  sum  them  up  before 
he  ventures  to  criticise. 

The  principles  that  have  been  employed  in 
putting  life  into  literature  must  be  employed 
on  drawing  life  out  of  it.  These  principles  are 
the  creative  principles — principles  of  joy.  All 
influences  in  education,  family  training,  and  a 
man's  life  that  tend  to  overawe,  crowd  out, 
and  make  impossible  his  own  private,  personal, 
daily  habit  of  creative  joy  are  the  enemies  of 
books. 


II 


Iprlvate  IRoab :  ©aneeroue 

The  impotence  of  the  study  of  literature  as 
practised  in  the  schools  and  colleges  of  the 
present  day  turns  largely  on  the  fact  that  the 
principle  of  creative  joy — of  knowing  through 
creative  joy — is  overlooked.  The  field  of  vision 
is  the  book  and  not  the  world.  In  the  average 
course  in  literature  the  field  is  not  even  the 
book.  It  is  still  farther  from  the  creative 
point  of  view.      It  is  the  book  about  the  book. 

It  is  written  generally  in  the  laborious,  un- 
readable, well-read  style — the  book  about  the 
book.  You  are  as  one  (when  you  are  in  the 
book  about  the  book)  thrust  into  the  shadow 
of  the  endless  aisles  of  Other  Books — not  that 
they  are  referred  to  baldly,  or  vulgarly,  or  in 
the  text.     It  is  worse  than  this  (for  this  could 


private  1Roa& :  Dangerous 


87 


be  skipped).  But  you  are  surrounded  help- 
lessly. Invisible  lexicons  are  on  every  page. 
Grammars  and  rhetorics,  piled  up  in  para- 
graphs and  between  the  lines  thrust  at  you 
everywhere.  Hardly  a  chapter  that  does  not 
convey  its  sense  of  struggling  faithfulness,  of 
infinite  forlorn  and  empty  plodding — and  all 
for  something  a  man  might  have  known  any- 
way. *  *  I  have  toted  a  thousand  books, ' '  each 
chapter  seems  to  say.  * '  This  one  paragraph 
[page  1993  —  you  feel  it  in  the  paragraph] 
has  had  to  have  forty-seven  books  carried  to 
it. ' '  Not  once,  except  in  loopholes  in  his  read- 
ing which  come  now  and  then,  does  the  face  of 
the  man's  soul  peep  forth.  One  does  not  ex- 
pect to  meet  any  one  in  the  book  about  the 
book — not  one's  self,  not  even  the  man  who 
writes  it,  nor  the  man  who  writes  the  book  that 
the  book  is  about.  One  is  confronted  with  a 
mob. 

Two  things  are  apt  to  be  true  of  students 
who  study  the  great  masters  in  courses  em- 
ploying the  book  about  the  book.  Even  if  the 
books  about  the  book  are  what  they  ought  to 
be,  the  pupils  of  ^uch  courses  find  that  (i) 
studying  the  master,  instead  of  the  things  he 
mastered,  they  lose  all  power  over  the  things 
he  mastered ;  (2)  they  lose,  consequently,  not 
only  the  power  of  creating  masterpieces  out 
of  these  things  themselves,  but  the  power 
of  enjoying  those  that  have  been  created  by 
others,  of  having  the  daily  experiences  that 


private 

IRoai: 

S>angecous 


S8 


ZTbc  Cbil5  anb  TLbc  IBooft 


private 

IRoab: 

Dangerous 


make  such  joy  possible.  They  are  out  of 
range  of  experience.  They  are  barricaded 
against  life.  Inasmuch  as  the  creators  of 
literature,  without  a  single  exception,  have 
been  more  interested  in  life  than  in  books, 
and  have  written  books  to  help  other  people  to 
be  more  interested  in  life  than  in  books,  this  is 
the  gravest  possible  defect.  To  be  more  inter- 
ested in  life  than  in  books  is  the  first  essential 
for  creating  a  book  or  for  understanding  one. 

The  typical  course  of  study  now  o£fered  in 
literature  carries  on  its  process  of  paralysis  in 
various  ways: 

First.  It  undermines  the  imagination  by 
giving  it  paper  things  instead  of  real  ones  to 
work  on. 

Second.  By  seeing  that  these  things  are  se- 
lected instead  of  letting  the  imagination  select 
its  own  things  —  the  essence  of  having  an 
imagination. 

Third.  By  requiring  of  the  student  a  rigor- 
ous and  ceaselessly  unimaginative  habit.  The 
paralysis  of  the  learned  is  forced  upon  him. 
He  finds  little  escape  from  the  constant  read- 
ing of  books  that  have  all  the  imagination  left 
out  of  them. 

Fourth.  By  forcing  the  imagination  to  work 
so  hard  in  its  capacity  of  pack-horse  and  mem- 
ory that  it  has  no  power  left  to  go  anywhere 
of  itself. 

Fifth.  By  overawing  individual  initiative, 
undermining  personality  in  the  pupil,  crowding 


private  1Roa& :  S)anderous 


89 


great  classics  into  him  instead  of  attracting  little 
ones  out  of  him.  Attracting  little  classics  out  of 
a  man  is  a  thing  that  great  classics  are  always 
intended  to  do — the  thing  that  they  always 
succeed  in  doing  when  left  to  themselves. 

Sixth.  The  teacher  of  literature  so-called, 
having  succeeded  in  destroying  the  personality 
of  the  pupil,  puts  himself  in  front  of  the  per- 
sonality of  the  author. 

Seventh.  A  teacher  who  destroys  personality 
in  a  pupil  is  the  wrong  personality  to  put  in 
front  of  an  author.  If  he  were  the  right  one, 
if  he  had  the  spirit  of  the  author,  his  being  in 
front,  now  and  then  at  least,  would  be  inter- 
pretation and  inspiration.  Not  having  the 
spirit  of  the  author,  he  is  intimidated  by  him, 
or  has  all  he  can  do  not  to  be.  A  classic  can- 
not reveal  itself  to  a  groveller  or  to  a  critic. 
It  is  a  book  that  was  written  standing  up  and 
it  can  only  be  studied  and  taught  by  those 
who  stand  up  without  knowing  it.  The  de- 
corous and  beautiful  despising  of  one's  self 
that  the  study  of  the  classics  has  come  to  be  as 
conducted  under  undassic  teachers,  is  a  fact 
that  speaks  for  itself. 

Eighth.  Even  if  the  personality  of  the 
teacher  of  literature  is  so  fortunate  as  not  to 
be  the  wrong  one,  there  is  not  enough  of  it. 
There  is  hardly  a  course  of  literature  that  can 
be  found  in  a  college  catalogue  at  the  present 
time  that  does  not  base  itself  on  the  dictum 
that  a  great  book  can  somehow  —  by  some 


private 

1Roab: 

S)angerou0 


90 


TLbc  Cbtl^  ant)  XTbe  JSooft 


f>rivate 

IRoab: 
S>anaerou0 


mysterious  process — be  taught  by  a  small  per- 
son .  The  axiom  that  necessarily  undermines  all 
such  courses  is  obvious  enough.  A  great  book 
cannot  be  taught  except  by  a  teacher  who  is 
literally  living  in  a  great  spirit,  the  spirit  the 
great  book  lived  in  before  it  became  a  book, — 
a  teacher  who  has  the  great  book  in  him — not 
over  him, — who,  if  he  took  time  for  it,  might 
be  capable  of  writing,  in  some  sense  at  least,  a 
great  book  himself.  When  the  teacher  is  a 
teacher  of  this  kind,  teaches  the  spirit  of  what 
he  teaches  —  that  is,  teaches  the  inside, —  a 
classic  can  be  taught. 

Otherwise  the  best  course  in  literature  that 
can  be  devised  is  the  one  that  gives  the  master- 
pieces the  most  opportunity  to  teach  them- 
selves. The  object  of  a  course  in  literature  is 
best  served  in  proportion  as  the  course  is  ar- 
ranged and  all  associated  studies  are  arranged 
in  such  a  way  as  to  secure  sensitive  and  con- 
tagious conditions  for  the  pupil's  mind  in  the 
presence  of  the  great  masters,  such  conditions 
as  give  the  pupil  time,  freedom,  space,  and 
atmosphere — the  things  out  of  which  a  master- 
piece is  written  and  with  which  alone  it  can  be 
taught,  or  can  teach  itself. 

All  that  comes  between  a  masterpiece  and 
its  thus  teaching  itself,  spreads  ruin  both 
ways.  The  masterpiece  is  partitioned  off  from 
the  pupil,  guarded  to  be  kept  aloof  from  him 
— outside  of  him.  The  pupil  is  locked  up  from 
himself — ^his  possible  self. 


private  IRoab :  lS>mQCto\x3 


91 


Not  too  much  stress  could  possibly  be  laid 
upon  intimacy  with  the  great  books  or  on  the 
constant  habit  of  living  on  them.  They  are 
the  movable  Olympus.  All  who  create  camp 
out  between  the  heavens  and  the  earth  on  them 
and  breathe  and  live  and  climb  upon  them. 
From  their  mighty  sides  they  look  down  on 
human  life.  But  classics  can  only  be  taught 
by  classics.  The  creative  paralysis  of  pupils 
who  have  drudged  most  deeply  in  classical 
training — English  or  otherwise — is  a  fact  that 
no  observer  of  college  life  can  overlook.  The 
guilt  for  this  state  of  affairs  must  be  laid  at 
the  door  of  the  classics  or  at  the  door  of  the 
teachers.  Either  the  classics  are  not  worth 
teaching  or  they  are  not  being  taught  properly. 

In  either  case  the  best  way  out  of  the  diffi- 
culty would  seem  to  be  for  teachers  to  let  the 
classics  teach  themselves,  to  furnish  the  stu- 
dents with  the  atmosphere,  the  conditions,  the 
points  of  view  in  life,  which  will  give  the 
classics  a  chance  to  teach  themselves. 

This  brings  us  to  the  important  fact  that 
teachers  of  literature  do  not  wish  to  create  the 
atmosphere,  the  conditions,  and  points  of  view 
that  give  the  classics  a  chance  to  teach  them- 
selves. Creating  the  atmosphere  for  a  classic 
in  the  life  of  a  student  is  harder  than  creating 
a  classic.  The  more  obvious  and  practicable 
course  is  to  teach  the  classic— teach  it  one's 
self,  whether  there  is  atmosphere  or  not. 

It  is  admitted  that  this  is  not  the  ideal  way 


private 

IRoaD: 
S>angerons 


92 


Ubc  dbilD  anD  XLbc  JSooft 


f>tivate 

1Roa&: 

S)angerou0 


to  do  with  college  students  who  suppose  they 
are  studying  literature,  but  it  is  contended — 
college  students  and  college  electives  being 
what  they  are — that  there  is  nothing  else  to 
do.  The  situation  sums  itself  up  in  the  atti- 
tude of  self-defence.  "  It  may  be  (as  no  one 
needs  to  point  out),  that  the  teaching  of  litera- 
ture, as  at  present  conducted  in  college,  is  a 
somewhat  faithful  and  dogged  farce,  but  what- 
ever may  be  the  faults  of  modern  college- 
teaching  in  literature,  it  is  as  good  as  our  pupils 
deserve."  In  other  words,  the  teachers  are 
not  respecting  their  pupils.  It  may  be  said  to 
be  the  constitution  and  by-laws  of  the  litera- 
ture class  (as  generally  conducted)  that  the 
teachers  cannot  and  must  not  respect  their 
pupils.  They  cannot  afiford  to.  It  costs  more 
than  most  pupils  are  mentally  worth,  it  is 
plausibly  contended,  to  furnish  students  in 
college  with  the  conditions  of  life  and  the  con- 
ditions in  their  own  minds  that  will  give  mas- 
terpieces a  fair  chance  at  them.  Brg-o,  inas- 
much as  the  average  pupil  cannot  be  taught  a 
classic  he  must  be  choked  with  it. 

The  fact  that  the  typical  teacher  of  literature 
is  more  or  less  grudgingly  engaged  in  doing 
his  work  and  conducting  his  classes  under  the 
practical  working  theory  that  his  pupils  are 
not  good  enough  for  him,  suggests  two  import- 
ant principles. 

First.  If  his  pupils  are  good  enough  for  him, 
they  are  good  enough  to  be  taught  the  best 


private  IRoaD :  Dangerous 


93 


there  is  in  him,  and  they  must  be  taught  this 
best  there  is  in  him,  as  far  as  it  goes,  whether 
all  of  them  are  good  enough  for  it  or  not. 
There  is  as  much  learning  in  watching  others 
being  educated  as  there  is  in  appearing  to  be 
educated  one's  self. 

Second.  If  his  pupils  are  not  good  enough 
for  him,  the  most  literary  thing  he  can  do  with 
them  is  to  make  them  good  enough.  If  he  is 
not  a  suflSciently  literary  teacher  to  divine  the 
central  ganglion  of  interest  in  a  pupil,  and  play 
upon  it  and  gather  delight  about  it  and  make 
it  gather  delight  itself,  the  next  most  literary 
thing  he  can  do  is  protect  both  the  books  and 
the  pupil  by  keeping  them  faithfully  apart  until 
they  are  ready  for  one  another. 

If  the  teacher  cannot  recognise,  arouse,  and 
exercise  such  organs  as  his  pupil  has,  and 
carry  them  out  into  themselves,  and  free  them 
in  self-activity,  the  pupil  may  be  unfortunate  in 
not  having  a  better  teacher,  but  he  is  fortunate 
in  having  no  better  organs  to  be  blundered  on. 

The  drawing  out  of  a  pupil's  first  faint  but 
honest  and  lasting  power  of  really  reading  a 
book,  of  knowing  what  it  is  to  be  sensitive  to 
a  book,  does  not  produce  a  very  literary-looking 
result,  of  course,  and  it  is  hard  to  give  the  re- 
sult an  impressive  or  learned  look  in  a  cata- 
logue, and  it  is  a  diflScult  thing  to  do  without 
considering  each  pupil  as  a  special  human  being 
by  himself, — worthy  of  some  attention  on  that 
account, — but  it  is  the  one  upright,  worthy, 


Pdvate 

1Roat>: 

Sangecoud 


94 


XTbe  dbllD  anO  XTbe  Book 


private 

IRoab: 

S)angerous 


and  beautiful  thing  a  teacher  can  do.  Any 
easier  course  he  may  choose  to  adopt  in  an  insti- 
tution of  learning  (even  when  it  is  taken  help- 
lessly or  thoughtlessly  as  it  generally  is)  is  insin- 
cere and  spectacular,  a  despising  not  only  of  the 
pupil  but  of  the  college  public  and  of  one's  self. 
If  it  is  true  that  the  right  study  of  literature 
consists  in  exercising  and  opening  out  the  hu- 
man mind  instead  of  making  it  a  place  for  cold 
storage,  it  is  not  necessary  to  call  attention  to 
the  essential  pretentiousness  and  shoddiness  of 
the  average  college  course  in  literature.  At 
its  best — that  is,  if  the  pupils  do  not  do  the 
work,  the  study  of  literature  in  college  is  a 
sorry  spectacle  enough— a  kind  of  huge  girls' 
school  with  a  chaperone  taking  its  park  walk. 
At  its  worst — that  is,  when  the  pupils  do  do 
the  work,  it  is  a  sight  that  would  break  a 
Homer's  heart.  If  it  were  not  for  a  few  in- 
spired and  inconsistent  teachers  blessing  par- 
ticular schools  and  scholars  here  and  there, 
doing  a  little  guilty,  furtive  teaching,  whether 
or  no,  discovering  short-cuts,  climbing  fences, 
breaking  through  the  fields,  and  walking  on 
the  grass,  the  whole  modern  scheme  of  elabor- 
ate, tireless,  endless  laboriousness  would  come 
to  nothing,  except  the  sight  of  larger  piles  of 
paper  in  the  world,  perhaps,  and  rows  of  dreary, 
dogged  people  with  degrees  lugging  them  back 
and  forth  in  it, — one  pile  of  paper  to  another 
pile  of  paper,  and  a  general  sense  that  some- 
thing is  being  done. 


XTbe  ©rgans  ot  Xtterature 


95 


In  the  meantime,  human  life  around  us, 
trudging  along  in  its  anger,  sorrow,  or  bliss, 
wonders  what  this  thing  is  that  is  being  done, 
and  has  a  vague  and  troubled  respect  for  it; 
but  it  is  to  be  noted  that  it  buys  and  reads  the 
books  (and  that  it  has  always  bought  and  read 
the  books)  of  those  who  have  not  done  it,  and 
who  are  not  doing  it, — those  who,  standing  in 
the  spectacle  of  the  universe,  have  been  sens- 
itive to  it,  have  had  a  mighty  love  in  it,  or  a 
mighty  hate,  or  a  true  experience,  and  who 
have  laughed  and  cried  with  it  through  the 
hearts  of  their  brothers  to  the  ends  of  the 
earth. 


"Cbe 
(^rgana  of 
literature 


III 


Zhc  QvQme  of  literature 

The  literary  problem — the  problem  of  pos- 
sessing or  appreciating  or  teaching  a  literary 
style — resolves  itself  at  last  into  a  pure  problem 
of  personality.  A  pupil  is  being  trained  in 
literature  in  proportion  as  his  spiritual  and 
physical  powers  are  being  brought  out  by  the 
teacher  and  played  upon  until  they  permeate 
each  other  in  all  that  he  does  and  in  all  that 
he  is — in  all  phases  of  his  life.  Unless  what  a 
pupil  is  glows  to  the  finger  tips  of  his  words, 
he  cannot  write,  and  unless  what  he  is  makes 
the  words  of  other  men  glow  when  he  reads, 
he  cannot  read. 


96 


UDc  CbilC>  ant>  Ubc  JSooft 


tCbe 
Qvg&nB  of 
literature 


In  proportion  as  it  is  great,  literature  is  ad- 
dressed to  all  of  a  man's  body  and  to  all  of  his 
soul.  It  matters  nothing  how  much  a  man 
may  know  about  books,  unless  the  pages  of 
them  play  upon  his  senses  while  he  reads,  he 
is  not  physically  a  cultivated  man,  a  gentle- 
man, or  scholar  with  his  body.  Unless  books 
play  upon  all  his  spiritual  and  mental  sensibil- 
ities when  he  reads  he  cannot  be  considered 
a  cultivated  man,  a  gentleman,  and  a  scholar 
in  his  soul.  It  is  the  essence  of  all  great 
literature  that  it  makes  its  direct  appeal  to 
sense-perceptions  permeated  with  spiritual  sug- 
gestion. There  is  no  such  thing  possible  as 
being  a  literary  authority,  a  cultured  or  schol- 
arly man,  unless  the  permeating  of  the  sense- 
perceptions  with  spiritual  suggestion  is  a  daily 
and  unconscious  habit  of  life.  * '  Kvery  man 
his  own  poet"  is  the  underlying  assumption 
of  every  genuine  work  of  art,  and  a  work  of 
art  cannot  be  taught  to  a  pupil  in  any  other 
way  than  by  making  this  same  pupil  a  poet, 
by  getting  him  to  discover  himself.  Continued 
and  unfaltering  disaster  is  all  that  can  be  ex- 
pected of  all  methods  of  literary  training  that 
do  not  recognise  this. 

To  teach  a  pupil  all  that  can  be  known 
about  a  great  poem  is  to  take  the  poetry  out 
of  him,  and  to  make  the  poem  prose  to  him 
forever.  A  pupil  cannot  even  be  taught  great 
prose  except  by  making  a  poet  of  him,  in  his 
attitude  toward  it,  and  by  so  governing  the 


XTbe  ©roans  ot  ^Literature 


97 


conditions,  excitements,  duties,  and  habits  of 
his  course  of  study  that  he  will  discover  he  is 
a  poet  in  spite  of  himself.  The  essence  of 
Walter  Pater's  essays  cannot  be  taught  to  a 
pupil  except  by  making  a  new  creature  of  him 
in  the  presence  of  the  things  the  essays  are 
about.  Unless  the  conditions  of  a  pupil's 
course  are  so  governed,  in  college  or  otherwise, 
as  to  insure  and  develop  the  delicate  and  strong 
response  of  all  his  bodily  senses,  at  the  time  of 
his  life  when  nature  decrees  that  his  senses 
must  be  developed,  that  the  spirit  must  be 
waked  in  them,  or  not  at  all,  the  study  of 
Walter  Pater  will  be  in  vain. 

The  physical  organisation,  the  mere  bodily 
state  of  the  pupil,  necessary  to  appreciate  either 
the  form  or  the  substance  of  a  bit  of  writing 
like  The  Child  in  the  House,  is  the  first  thing  a 
true  teacher  is  concerned  with.  A  college 
graduate  whose  nostrils  have  not  been  trained 
for  years, — steeped  in  the  great,  still  delights 
of  the  ground, — who  has  not  learned  the  spirit 
and  fragrance  of  the  soil  beneath  his  feet,  is  not 
a  suiB&ciently  cultivated  person  to  pronounce 
judgment  either  upon  Walter  Pater's  style  or 
upon  his  definition  of  style. 

To  be  educated  in  the  great  literatures  of 
the  world  is  to  be  trained  in  the  drawing  out 
in  one's  own  body  and  mind  of  the  physical 
and  mental  powers  of  those  who  write  great 
literatures.  Culture  is  the  feeling  of  the  in- 
duced current — the  thrill  of  the  lives  of  the 


Ube 
(Organs  of 
Xiterature 


98 


TLbc  Cbtld  anb  XLbc  JBook 


Ube 
Organs  of 
literature 


dead — the  charging  the  nerves  of  the  body 
and  powers  of  the  spirit  with  the  genius  that 
has  walked  the  earth  before  us.  In  the  bor- 
rowed glories  of  the  great  for  one  swift  and 
passing  page  we  walk  before  heaven  with 
them,  breathe  the  long  breath  of  the  centuries 
with  them,  know  the  joy  of  the  gods  and  live. 
The  man  of  genius  is  the  man  who  literally 
gives  himself.  He  makes  every  man  a  man 
of  genius  for  the  time  being.  He  exchanges 
souls  with  us  and  for  one  brief  moment  we  are 
great,  we  are  beautiful,  we  are  immortal.  We 
are  visited  with  our  possible  selves.  Literature 
is  the  transfiguring  of  the  senses  in  which  men 
are  dwelling  every  day  and  of  the  thoughts  of 
the  mind  in  which  they  are  living  every  day. 
It  is  the  commingling  of  one's  life  in  one  vast 
network  of  sensibility,  communion,  and  eternal 
comradeship  with  all  the  joy  and  sorrow,  taste, 
odor,  and  sound,  passion  of  men  and  love  of 
women  and  worship  of  God,  that  ever  has  been 
on  the  earth,  since  the  watching  of  the  first 
night  above  the  earth,  or  since  the  look  of  the 
first  morning  on  it,  when  it  was  loved  for  the 
first  time  by  a  human  life. 

The  artist  is  recognised  as  an  artist  in  pro- 
portion as  the  senses  of  his  body  drift  their 
glow  and  splendour  over  into  the  creations  of 
his  mind.  He  is  an  artist  because  his  flesh  is 
informed  with  the  spirit,  because  in  whatever 
he  does  he  incarnates  the  spirit  in  the  flesh. 

The  gentle,  stroking  delight  in  this  universe 


Ube  ©rgans  of  Xttetature 


99 


that  Dr.  Holmes  took  all  his  days,  his  con- 
tagious gladness  in  it  and  approval  of  it,  his 
impressionableness  to  its  moods — its  Oliver- 
Wendell  ones, — who  really  denies  in  his  soul 
that  this  capacity  of  Dr.  Holmes  to  enjoy,  this 
delicate,  ceaseless  tasting  with  sense  and  spirit 
of  the  essence  of  life,  was  the  very  substance 
of  his  culture  ?  The  books  that  he  wrote  and 
the  things  that  he  knew  were  merely  the  form 
of  it.  His  power  of  expression  was  the  blend- 
ing of  sense  and  spirit  in  him,  and  because  his 
mind  was  trained  into  the  texture  of  his  body 
people  delighted  in  his  words  in  form  and  spirit 
both. 

There  is  no  training  in  the  art  of  expression 
or  study  of  those  who  know  how  to  express, 
that  shall  not  consist,  not  in  a  pupil's  knowing 
wherein  the  power  of  a  book  lies,  but  in  his 
experiencing  the  power  himself,  in  his  entering 
the  life  behind  the  book  and  the  habit  of  life 
that  made  writing  such  a  book  and  reading  it 
possible.  This  habit  is  the  habit  of  incarna- 
tion. 

A  true  and  classic  book  is  always  the  history 
some  human  soul  has  had  in  its  tent  of  flesh, 
camped  out  beneath  the  stars,  groping  for  the 
thing  they  shine  to  us,  trying  to  find  a  body 
for  it.  In  the  great  wide  plain  of  wonder  there 
they  sing  the  wonder  a  little  time  to  us,  if  we 
listen.  Then  they  pass  on  to  it.  I<iterature 
is  but  the  faint  echo  tangled  in  thousands  of 
years,  of  this  mighty,  lonely  singing  of  theirs. 


Ube 
Organs  of 
literature 


lOO 


Zbc  (TbilD  anb  Zbc  JSooh 


£ntcance 

atfons  in 
50B 


under  the  Dome  of  Life,  in  the  presence  of  the 
things  that  books  are  about.  The  power  to 
read  a  great  book  is  the  power  to  glory  in  these 
things,  and  to  use  that  glory  every  day  to  do 
one's  living  and  reading  with.  Knowing  what 
is  in  the  book  may  be  called  learning,  but  the 
test  of  culture  always  is  that  it  will  not  be  con- 
tent with  knowledge  unless  it  is  inward  know- 
ledge. Inward  knowledge  is  the  knowledge 
that  comes  to  us  from  behind  the  book,  from 
living  for  weeks  with  the  author  until  his  habits 
have  become  our  habits,  until  God  Himself, 
through  days  and  nights  and  deeds  and  dreams, 
has  blended  our  souls  together. 


IV 

Entrance  iBxamlnatlone  in  3oi? 


If  entrance  examinations  in  joy  were  re- 
quired at  our  representative  colleges  very  few 
of  the  pupils  who  are  prepared  for  college  in 
the  ordinary  way  would  be  admitted.  What  is 
more  serious  than  this,  the  honour-pupils  in 
the  colleges  themselves  at  commencement  time 
— those  who  have  submitted  most  fully  to  the 
college  requirements — would  take  a  lower 
stand  in  a  final  examination  in  joy,  whether 
of  sense  or  spirit,  than  any  others  in  the  class. 
Their  education  has  not  consisted  in  the  acquir- 
ing of  a  state  of  being,  a  condition  of  organs,  a 
capacity  of  tasting  life,  of  creating  and  sharing 


Bntrance  iBiamtnations  in  3o^ 


lOI 


the  joys  and  meanings  in  it.  Their  learning 
has  largely  consisted  in  the  fact  that  they  have 
learned  at  last  to  let  their  joys  go.  They  have 
become  the  most  satisfactory  of  scholars,  not 
because  of  their  power  of  knowing,  but  because 
of  their  willingness  to  be  powerless  in  knowing. 
When  they  have  been  drilled  to  know  without 
joy,  have  become  the  day-labourers  of  learn- 
ing, they  are  given  diplomas  for  cheerlessness, 
and  are  sent  forth  into  the  world  as  teachers  of 
the  young.  Almost  any  morning,  in  almost 
any  town  or  city  beneath  the  sun,  you  can  see 
them.  Gentle  Reader,  with  the  children,  spread- 
ing their  tired  minds  and  their  tired  bodies 
over  all  the  fresh  and  buoyant  knowledge  of 
the  earth.  Knowledge  that  has  not  been 
throbbed  in  cannot  be  throbbed  out.  The 
graduates  of  the  colleges  for  women  (in  The 
Association  of  Collegiate  Alumnae)  have  seri- 
ously discussed  the  question  whether  the  col- 
lege course  in  literature  made  them  nearer  or 
farther  from  creating  literature  themselves. 
The  Editor  of  Harper's  Monthly  has  recorded 
that  **  the  spontaneity  and  freedom  of  subjective 
construction  "  in  certain  American  authors  was 
only  made  possible,  probably,  by  their  having 
escaped  an  early  academic  training.  The  Cen- 
tury Magazine  has  been  so  struck  with  the  fact 
that  hardly  a  single  writer  of  original  power 
before  the  public  has  been  a  regular  college 
graduate  that  it  has  offered  special  prizes  and 
inducements  for  any  form  of  creative  literature 


Entrance 
£;amin« 
ations  in 


I02 


XTbe  Cbilb  ariO  Zbc  3Booft 


Entrance 

£;amins 

ations  in 

5oie 


— poem,  story,  or  essay — that  a  college  gradu- 
ate could  write. 

If  a  teacher  of  literature  desires  to  remove 
his  subject  from  the  uncreative  methods  he 
finds  in  use  around  him,  he  can  only  do  so 
successfully  by  persuading  trustees  and  college 
presidents  that  literature  is  an  art  and  that  it 
can  only  be  taught  through  the  methods  and 
spirit  and  conditions  that  belong  to  art.  If  he 
succeeds  in  persuading  trustees  and  presidents, 
he  will  probably  find  that  faculties  are  not  per- 
suaded, and  that,  in  the  typical  Germanised 
institution  of  learning  at  least,  any  work  he 
may  choose  to  do  in  the  spirit  and  method  of 
joy  will  be  looked  upon  by  the  larger  part  of 
his  fellow  teachers  as  superficial  and  pleasant. 
Those  who  do  not  feel  that  it  is  superficial  and 
pleasant,  who  grant  that  working  for  a  state 
of  being  is  the  most  profound  and  worthy  and 
strenuous  work  a  teacher  can  do, — that  it  is 
what  education  is  for, — will  feel  that  it  is  im- 
practicable. It  is  thus  that  it  has  come  to  pass 
in  the  average  institution  of  learning,  that  if 
a  teacher  does  not  know  what  education  is,  he 
regards  education  as  superficial,  and  if  he  does 
know  what  education  is,  he  regards  education 
as  impossible. 

It  is  not  intended  to  be  dogmatic,  but  it  may 
be  worth  while  to  state  from  the  pupil's  point 
of  view  and  from  memory  what  kind  of  teacher 
a  college  student  who  is  really  interested  in 
literature  would  like  to  have. 


Bntrance  }6jamtnation5  in  5op 


103 


Given  a  teacher  of  literature  who  has  carte 
blanche  from  the  other  teachers — the  authorities 
around  him  —  and  from  the  trustees  —  the 
authorities  over  him, — what  kind  of  a  stand 
will  he  find  it  best  to  take,  if  he  proposes  to 
give  his  pupils  an  actual  knowledge  of  litera- 
ture? 

In  the  first  place,  he  will  stand  on  the  general 
principle  that  if  a  pupil  is  to  have  an  actual 
knowledge  of  literature  as  literature,  he  must 
experience  literature  as  an  art. 

In  the  second  place,  if  he  is  to  teach  litera- 
ture to  his  pupils  as  an  art  to  be  mastered,  he 
will  begin  his  teaching  as  a  master.  Instead 
of  his  pupils'  determining  that  they  will  elect 
him,  he  will  elect  them.  If  there  is  to  be  any 
candidating,  he  will  see  that  the  candidating 
is  properly  placed ;  that  the  privilege  at  least  of 
the  first-class  music  master,  dancing  master, 
and  teacher  of  painting — the  choosing  of  his 
own  pupils — is  accorded  to  him.  Inasmuch  as 
the  power  and  value  of  his  class  must  always 
depend  upon  him,  he  will  not  allow  either  the 
size  or  the  character  of  his  classes  to  be  deter- 
mined by  a  catalogue,  or  by  the  examinations 
of  other  persons,  or  by  the  advertising  facili- 
ties of  the  college.  If  actual  results  are  to  be 
achieved  in  his  pupils,  it  can  only  be  by  his 
governing  the  conditions  of  their  work  and  by 
keeping  these  conditions  at  all  times  in  his  own 
hands. 

In  the  third  place,  he  will  see  that  his  class 


entrance 

JEfamins 

attone  iw. 

3oB 


I04 


XTbe  Cbil&  auD  Zbc  J5ooft 


Entrance 

l&ramins 

ations  in 

30B 


is  SO  conducted  that  out  of  a  hundred  who  de- 
sire to  belong  to  it  the  best  ten  only  will  be 
able  to. 

In  the  fourth  place,  he  will  himself  not  only 
determine  which  are  the  best  ten,  but  he  will 
make  this  determination  on  the  one  basis  pos- 
sible for  a  teacher  of  art — the  basis  of  mutual 
attraction  among  the  pupils.  He  will  take  his 
stand  on  the  spiritual  principle  that  if  classes 
are  to  be  vital  classes,  it  is  not  enough  that  the 
pupils  should  elect  the  teacher,  but  the  teacher 
and  pupils  must  elect  each  other.  The  basis 
of  an  art  is  the  mutual  attraction  that  exists 
between  things  that  belong  together.  The 
basis  for  transmitting  an  art  to  other  persons 
is  the  natural  attraction  that  exists  between 
persons  that  belong  together.  The  more 
mutual  the  attraction  is, — complementary  or 
otherwise, — the  more  condensed  and  power- 
ful teaching  can  it  be  made  the  conductor  of. 
If  a  hundred  candidates  oflfer  themselves,  fifty 
will  be  rejected  because  the  attraction  is  not 
mutual  enough  to  insure  swift  and  permanent 
results.  Out  of  fifty,  forty  will  be  rejected 
probably  for  the  sake  of  ten  with  whom  the 
mutual  attraction  is  so  great  that  great  things 
cannot  help  being  accomplished  by  it. 

The  thorough  and  contagious  teacher  of 
literature  will  hold  his  power — the  power  of 
conveying  the  current  and  mood  of  art  to 
others — as  a  public  trust.  He  owes  it  to  the 
institution  in  which  he  is  placed  to  refuse  to 


Bntrance  jEjamtnattons  in  Jo^ 


105 


surround  himself  with  non-conductors;  and 
inasmuch  as  his  power — such  as  it  is — is  in- 
stinctive power,  it  will  be  placed  where  it  in- 
stinctively counts  the  most.  In  proportion  as 
he  loves  his  art  and  loves  his  kind  and  desires 
to  get  them  on  speaking  terms  with  each  other, 
he  will  devote  himself  to  selected  pupils,  to 
those  with  whom  he  will  throw  the  least  away. 
His  service  to  others  will  be  to  give  to  these 
such  real,  inspired,  and  reproductive  know- 
ledge, that  it  shall  pass  on  from  them  to  others 
of  its  own  inherent  energy.  From  the  nar- 
rower— that  is,  the  less  spiritual — point  of  view, 
it  has  seemed  perhaps  a  selfish  and  aristocratic 
thing  for  a  teacher  to  make  distinctions  in  per- 
sons in  the  conduct  of  his  work,  but  from  the 
point  of  view  of  the  progress  of  the  world,  it  is 
heartless  and  sentimental  to  do  otherwise ;  and 
without  exception  all  of  the  most  successful 
teachers  in  all  of  the  arts  have  been  successful 
quite  as  much  through  a  kind  of  dictatorial  in- 
sight in  selecting  the  pupils  they  could  teach, 
as  in  selecting  the  things  they  could  teach 
them. 

In  the  fifth  place,  having  determined  to 
choose  his  pupils  himself,  the  selection  will  be 
determined  by  processes  of  his  own  choosing. 
These  processes,  whatever  form  or  lack  of  form 
they  may  take,  will  serve  to  convey  to  the 
teacher  the  main  knowledge  he  desires.  They 
will  be  an  examination  in  the  capacity  of  joy 
in  the  pupil.     Inasmuch  as  surplus  joy  in  a 


Sntrance 

Bfamftts 

atione  fn 

3os 


io6 


Ube  CbilD  ant)  Ube  3Booft 


]6ntrance 

£famtns 

ations  in 

302 


pupil  is  the  most  promising  thing  he  can  have, 
the  sole  secret  of  any  ability  he  may  ever  attain 
of  learning  literature,  the  basis  of  all  discipline, 
it  will  be  the  first  thing  the  teacher  takes  into 
account.  While  it  is  obvious  that  an  examina- 
tion in  joy  could  not  be  conducted  in  any  set 
fashion,  every  great  joy  in  the  world  has  its 
natural  diviners  and  experts,  and  teachers  of 
literature  who  know  its  joy  have  plenty  of 
ways  of  divining  this  joy  in  others. 

In  the  sixth  place,  pupils  will  be  dropped 
and  promoted  by  a  teacher,  in  such  a  class  as 
has  been  described,  according  to  the  spirit 
and  force  and  creativeness  of  their  daily  work. 
Promotion  will  be  by  elimination — that  is,  the 
pupil  will  stay  where  he  is  and  the  class  will 
be  made  smaller  for  him.  The  superior  natural 
force  of  each  pupil  will  have  full  sway  in  deter- 
mining his  share  of  the  teacher's  force.  As 
this  force  belongs  most  to  those  who  waste  it 
least,  if  five  tenths  of  the  appreciation  in  a 
class  belongs  to  one  pupil,  five  tenths  of  the 
teacher  belongs  to  him,  and  promotion  is  most 
truly  effected,  not  by  giving  the  best  pupils  a 
new  teacher,  but  by  giving  them  more  of  the 
old  one.  A  teacher's  work  can  only  be  suc- 
cessful in  proportion  as  it  is  accurately  indi- 
vidual and  puts  each  pupil  in  the  place  he  was 
made  to  fit. 

In  the  seventh  place,  the  select  class  will  be 
selected  by  the  teacher  as  a  baseball  captain 
selects  his  team:  not  as  being  the  nine  best 


laatural  Selection  in  Ubeori? 


107 


men,  but  as  being  the  nine  men  who  most  call 
each  other  out,  and  make  the  best  play  to- 
gether. If  the  teacher  selects  his  class  wisely, 
the  principle  of  his  selection  sometimes — from 
the  outside,  at  least — will  seem  no  principle  at 
all.  The  class  must  have  its  fool,  for  instance, 
and  pupils  must  be  selected  for  useful  defects 
as  well  as  for  virtues.  Belonging  to  such  a 
class  will  not  be  allowed  to  have  a  stiff,  definite, 
water-metre  meaning  in  it,  with  regard  to  the 
capacity  of  a  pupil.  It  will  only  be  known 
that  he  is  placed  in  the  class  for  some  quality, 
fault,  or  inspiration  in  him  that  can  be  brought 
to  bear  on  the  state  of  being  in  the  class  in 
such  a  way  as  to  produce  results,  not  only  for 
himself  but  for  all  concerned. 


matural 
Selection 
(n  Ubeorg 


IRatural  Selection  in  tCbeor? 


The  conditions  just  stated  as  necessary  for 
the  vital  teaching  of  literature  narrow  them- 
selves down,  for  the  most  part,  to  the  very 
simple  and  common  principle  of  life  and  art, 
the  principle  of  natural  selection. 

As  an  item  in  current  philosophy  the  prin- 
ciple of  natural  selection  meets  with  general 
acceptance.  It  is  one  of  those  pleasant  and 
instructive  doctrines  which,  when  applied  to  ex- 
isting institutions,  is  opposed  at  once  as  a  sensa- 
tional, visionary,  and  revolutionary  doctrine. 


io8 


XTbe  Cbil^  anb  XTbe  Booft 


Vlatural 
Selection 
in  Ubeor^ 


There  are  two  most  powerful  objections  to 
the  doctrine  of  natural  selection  in  education. 
One  of  these  is  the  scholastic  objection  and  the 
other  is  the  religious  one. 

The  scholastic  objection  is  that  natural  se- 
lection in  education  is  impracticable.  It  can- 
not be  made  to  operate  mechanically,  or  for 
large  numbers,  and  it  interferes  with  nearly 
all  of  the  educational  machinery  for  hammer- 
ing heads  in  rows,  which  we  have  at  command 
at  present.  Even  if  the  machinery  could  be 
stopped  and  natural  selection  could  be  given 
the  place  that  belongs  to  it,  all  success  in  act- 
ing on  it  would  call  for  hand-made  teachers; 
and  hand-made  teachers  are  not  being  pro- 
duced when  we  have  nothing  but  machines  to 
produce  them  with.  The  scholastic  objection 
— that  natural  selection  in  education  is  im- 
practicable under  existing  conditions — is  ob- 
viously well  taken.  As  it  cannot  be  answered, 
it  had  best  be  taken,  perhaps,  as  a  recommen- 
dation. 

The  religious  objection  to  natural  selection 
in  education  is  not  that  it  is  impracticable,  but 
that  it  is  wicked.  It  rests  its  case  on  the  de- 
fence of  the  weak. 

But  the  question  at  issue  is  not  whether  the 
weak  shall  be  served  and  defended  or  whether 
they  shall  not.  We  all  would  serve  and  de- 
fend the  weak.  If  a  teacher  feels  that  he  can 
serve  his  inferior  pupils  best  by  making  his 
superior  pupils  inferior  too,  it  is  probable  that 


Tlatural  Selection  in  Ubeori? 


109 


he  had  better  do  it,  and  that  he  will  know  how 
to  do  it,  and  that  he  will  know  how  to  do  it 
better  than  any  one  else.  There  are  many 
teachers,  however,  who  have  the  instinctive 
belief,  and  who  act  on  it  so  far  as  they  are 
allowed  to,  that  to  take  the  stand  that  the  in- 
ferior pupil  must  be  defended  at  the  expense 
of  the  superior  pupil  is  to  take  a  sentimental 
stand.  It  is  not  a  stand  in  favour  of  the  in- 
ferior pupil,  but  against  him. 

The  best  way  to  respect  an  inferior  pupil  is 
to  keep  him  in  place.  The  more  he  is  kept  in 
place,  the  more  his  powers  will  be  called  upon. 
If  he  is  in  the  place  above  him,  he  may  see 
much  that  he  would  not  see  otherwise,  much 
at  which  he  will  wonder,  perhaps;  but  he  de- 
serves to  be  treated  spiritually  and  thoroughly, 
to  be  kept  where  he  will  be  creative,  where  his 
wondering  will  be  to  the  point,  both  at  once 
and  eventually. 

It  is  a  law  that  holds  as  good  in  the  life  of  a 
teacher  of  literature  as  it  does  in  the  lives  of 
makers  of  literature.  From  the  point  of  view 
of  the  world  at  large,  the  author  who  can  do 
anything  else  has  no  right  to  write  for  the 
average  man.  There  are  plenty  of  people  who 
cannot  help  writing  for  him.  I<et  them  do  it. 
It  is  their  right  and  the  world's  right  that  they 
should  be  the  ones  to  do  it.  It  is  the  place  that 
belongs  to  them,  and  why  should  nearly  every 
man  we  have  of  the  more  seeing  kind  to-day 
deliberately   compete   with    men   who  cannot 


"natural 
Selection 
in  Ubeotrs 


no 


Ubc  Cbtlb  ant)  Ube  Book 


matural 
Selection 
in  Ubeons 


compete  with  him  ?  The  man  who  abandons 
the  life  that  belongs  to  him, — the  life  that 
would  not  exist  in  the  world  if  he  did  not  live 
it  and  keep  it  existing  in  the  world,  and  who 
does  it  to  help  his  inferiors,  does  not  help  his 
inferiors.  He  becomes  their  rival.  He  crowds 
them  out  of  their  lives.  There  could  not  pos- 
sibly be  a  more  noble,  or  more  exact  and 
spiritual  law  of  progress  than  this — that  every 
man  should  take  his  place  in  human  society 
and  do  his  work  in  it  with  his  nearest  spiritual 
neighbours.  These  nearest  spiritual  neigh- 
bours are  a  part  of  the  economy  of  the  universe. 
They  are  now  and  always  have  been  the  natural 
conductors  over  the  face  of  the  earth  of  all 
actual  power  in  it.  It  has  been  through  the 
grouping  of  the  nearest  spiritual  neighbours 
around  the  world  that  men  have  unfailingly 
found  the  heaven-appointed,  world-remoulding 
teachers  of  every  age. 

It  does  not  sound  very  much  like  Thomas 
Jefferson, — and  it  is  to  be  admitted  that  there 
are  certain  lines  in  our  first  great  national 
document  which,  read  on  the  run  at  least,  may 
seem  to  deny  it, —  but  the  living  spirit  of 
Thomas  Jefferson  does  not  teach  that  amputa- 
tion is  progress,  nor  does  true  Democracy 
admit  either  the  patriotism  or  the  religion  of 
a  man  who  feels  that  his  legs  must  be  cut  off 
to  run  to  the  assistance  of  neighbours  whose 
legs  are  cut  off.  An  educational  Democracy 
which  expects  a  pupil  to  be  less  than  himself 


•Katural  Selection  in  practice 


III 


for  the  benefit  of  other  pupils  is  a  mock  De- 
mocracy, and  it  is  the  very  essence  of  a  De- 
mocracy of  the  truer  kind  that  it  expects  every 
man  in  it  to  be  more  than  himself.  And  if  a 
man's  religion  is  of  the  truer  kind,  it  will  not 
be  heard  telling  him  thaf  he  owes  it  to  God 
and  the  Average  Man  to  be  less  than  himself. 


'natural 
Selection 
in  practice 


VI 

IRatural  Selection  in  practice 

It  is  not  going  to  be  possible  very  much 
longer  to  take  it  for  granted  that  natural  selec- 
tion is  a  somewhat  absent-minded  and  heathen 
habit  that  God  has  fallen  into  in  the  natural 
world,  and  uses  in  his  dealings  with  men,  but 
that  it  is  not  a  good  enough  law  for  men  to 
use  in  their  dealings  with  one  another. 

The  main  thing  that  science  has  done  in  the 
last  fifty  years,  in  spite  of  conventional  religion 
and  so-called  scholarship,  has  been  to  bring  to 
pass  in  men  a  respect  for  the  natural  world. 
The  next  thing  that  is  to  be  brought  to  pass — 
also  in  spite  of  conventional  religion  and  so- 
called  scholarship — is  the  self-respect  of  the 
natural  man  and  of  the  instincts  of  human 
nature.  The  self-respect  of  the  natural  man, 
when  once  he  gains  it,  is  a  thing  that  is  bound 
to  take  care  of  itself,  and  take  care  of  the  man, 
and  take  care  of  everything  that  is  important 
to  the  man. 


Ube  dbilb  an&  Xlbe  IBooF; 


matural 
Selection 
in  practice 


Inasmuch  as,  in  the  long  run  at  least,  educa- 
tion, even  in  times  of  its  not  being  human, 
interests  humanity  more  than  anything  else,  a 
most  important  consequence  of  the  self-respect 
of  the  natural  man  is  going  to  be  an  uprising, 
all  over  the  world,  of  teachers  who  believe 
something.  The  most  important  consequence 
of  having  teachers  who  believe  something  will 
be  a  wholesale  and  uncompromising  rearrange- 
ment of  nearly  all  our  systems  and  methods  of 
education.  Instead  of  being  arranged  to  cow 
the  teacher  with  routine,  to  keep  teachers  from 
being  human  beings,  and  to  keep  their  pupils 
from  finding  it  out  if  they  are  human  beings, 
they  will  be  arranged  on  the  principle  that  the 
whole  object  of  knowledge  is  the  being  of  a 
human  being,  and  the  only  way  to  know  any- 
thing worth  knowing  in  the  world  is  to  begin 
by  knowing  how  to  be  a  human  being — and  by 
liking  it. 

Not  until  our  current  education  is  based 
throughout  on  expecting  great  things  of  human 
nature  instead  of  secretly  despising  it,  can  it 
truly  be  called  education.  Expectancy  is  the 
very  essence  of  education.  Actions  not  only 
speak  louder  than  words,  they  make  words  as 
though  they  were  not;  and  so  long  as  our 
teachers  confine  themselves  to  saying  beautiful 
and  literary  things  about  the  instincts  of  the 
human  heart,  and  do  not  trust  their  own  in- 
stincts in  their  daily  teaching,  and  the  instincts 
of  their  pupils,  and  do  not  make  this  trust  the 


IRatural  Selection  in  practice 


113 


foundation  of  all  their  work,  the  more  they 
educate  the  more  they  destroy.  The  destruc- 
tion is  both  ways,  and  whatever  the  subjects 
are  they  may  choose  to  know,  murder  and  sui- 
cide are  the  branches  they  teach. 

The  chief  characteristic  of  the  teacher  of  the 
future  is  going  to  be  that  he  will  dare  to  believe 
in  himself,  and  that  he  will  divine  some  one 
thing  to  believe  in,  in  everybody  else,  and  that, 
trusting  the  laws  of  human  nature,  he  will  go 
to  work  on  this  some  one  thing,  and  work  out 
from  it  to  everything.  Inasmuch  as  the  chief 
working  principle  of  human  nature  is  the  prin- 
ciple of  natural  selection,  the  entire  method 
of  the  teacher  of  the  future  will  be  based  on 
his  faith  in  natural  selection.  All  such  teach- 
ing as  he  attempts  to  do  will  be  worked  out 
from  the  temperamental,  involuntary,  primitive 
choices  of  his  own  being,  both  in  persons  and 
in  subject.  His  power  with  his  classes  will  be 
his  power  of  divining  the  free  and  unconscious 
and  primitive  choices  of  individual  pupils  in 
persons  and  subjects. 

Half  of  the  battle  is  already  won.  The 
principle  of  natural  selection  between  pupils 
and  subjects  is  recognised  in  the  elective  sys- 
tem, but  we  have  barely  commenced  to  con- 
ceive as  yet  the  principle  of  natural  selection 
in  its  more  important  application — mutual  at- 
traction between  teacher  and  pupil — natural 
selection  in  its  deeper  and  more  powerful  and 
spiritual  sense;   the  kind  of  natural  selection 


"natural 
Selection 
inf)vactice 


114 


Ube  CbtlD  an5  TLbc  JBook 


matutal 
Selection 
in  Practice 


that  makes  the  teacher  a  worker  in  wonder, 
and  education  the  handiwork  of  God. 

In  most  of  our  great  institutions  we  do  not 
believe  in  even  the  theory  of  this  deeper  natural 
selection;  and  if  we  do  believe  in  it,  sitting  in 
endowed  chairs  under  the  Umbrella  of  Endowed 
Ideas,  how  can  we  act  on  that  belief  ?  And  if 
we  do,  who  will  come  out  and  act  with  us  ?  If 
it  does  not  seem  best  for  even  the  single  teacher, 
doing  his  teaching  unattached  and  quite  by 
himself,  to  educate  in  the  open, — to  trust  his 
own  soul  and  the  souls  of  his  pupils  to  the 
nature  of  things,  how  much  less  shall  the  great 
institution,  with  its  crowds  of  teachers  and  its 
rows  of  pupils  and  its  Vested  Funds  be  expected 
to  la}^  itself  open — lay  its  teachers  and  pupils 
and  its  Vested  Funds  open — to  the  nature  of 
things?  We  are  suspicious  of  the  nature  of 
things.  God  has  concealed  a  lie  in  them.  We 
do  not  believe.     Therefore  we  cannot  teach. 

The  conclusion  is  inevitable.  As  long  as  we 
believe  in  natural  selection  between  pupil  and 
subject,  but  do  not  believe  in  natural  selection 
between  pupil  and  teacher,  no  great  results  in 
education  or  in  teaching  a  vital  relation  to 
books  or  to  anything  else  will  be  possible.  As 
long  as  natural  selection  between  pupil  and 
teacher  is  secretly  regarded  as  an  irreligious 
and  selfish  instinct,  with  which  a  teacher  must 
have  nothing  to  do,  instead  of  a  divine  ordi- 
nance, a  Heaven-appointed  starting-point  for 
doing  everything,  the  average  routine  teacher 


IRatural  Selection  in  practice 


115 


in  the  conventional  school  and  college  will  con- 
tinue to  be  the  kind  of  teacher  he  is,  and  will 
continue  to  belong  to  what  seems  to  many,  at 
least,  the  sentimental  and  superstitious  and 
pessimistic  profession  he  belongs  to  now. 
Why  should  a  teacher  allow  himself  to  teach 
without  inspiration  in  the  one  profession  on 
the  earth  where,  between  the  love  of  God  and 
the  love  of  the  opening  faces,  inspiration — one 
would  say  —  could  hardly  be  missed?  Cer- 
tainly, if  it  was  ever  intended  that  artists 
should  be  in  the  world  it  was  intended  that 
teachers  should  be  artists.  And  why  should 
we  be  artisans  ?  If  we  cannot  be  artists,  if  we 
are  not  allowed  to  make  our  work  a  self-ex- 
pression, were  it  not  better  to  get  one's  living 
by  the  labour  of  one's  hands, — by  digging  in 
the  wonder  of  the  ground  ?  A  stone-crusher, 
as  long  as  one  works  one's  will  with  it,  makes 
it  say  something,  is  nearer  to  nature  than  a 
college.  * '  I  would  rather  do  manual  labour 
with  my  hands  than  manual  labour  with  my 
soul,"  the  true  artist  is  saying  to-day,  and  a 
great  many  thousand  teachers  are  saying  it, 
and  thousands  more  who  would  like  to  teach. 
The  moment  that  teaching  ceases  to  be  a  trade 
and  becomes  a  profession  again,  these  thou- 
sands are  going  to  crowd  into  it.  Until  the 
artist- teachers  have  been  attracted  to  teaching, 
things  can  only  continue  as  they  are.  Young 
men  and  women  who  are  capable  of  teaching 
will  continue  to  do  all  that  they  can  not  to  get 


t^atural 
Selection 
in  practice 


i6 


TLbc  Cbilb  ant)  Ube  Booft 


'natural 

Selection 

in  practice 


into  it;  and  young  men  and  women  who  are 
capable  of  teaching,  and  who  are  still  trying  to 
teach,  will  continue  to  do  all  that  they  can  to 
get  out  of  it.  When  the  schools  of  America 
have  all  been  obliged,  like  the  city  of  Brooklyn, 
to  advertise  to  secure  even  poor  teachers,  we 
shall  begin  to  see  where  we  stand, — stop  our 
machinery  a  while  and  look  at  it. 

The  only  way  out  is  the  return  to  nature,  and 
to  faith  in  the  freedom  of  nature.  Not  until 
the  teacher  of  the  young  has  dared  to  return 
to  nature,  has  won  the  emancipation  of  his  own 
instincts  and  the  emancipation  of  the  instincts 
of  his  pupils,  can  we  expect  anything  better 
than  we  have  now  of  either  of  them.  Not  until 
the  modern  teacher  has  come  to  the  point  where 
he  deliberately  works  with  his  instincts,  where 
he  looks  upon  himself  as  an  artist  working  in 
the  subject  that  attracts  him  most,  and  in  the 
material  that  is  attracted  to  him  most,  can  we 
expect  to  secure  in  our  crowded  conditions  to- 
day enough  teaching  to  go  around.  The  one 
practical  and  economical  way  to  make  our 
limited  supply  of  passion  and  thought  cover 
the  ground  is  to  be  spiritual  and  spontaneous 
and  thorough  with  what  we  have.  The  one 
practical  and  economical  way  to  do  this  is  to 
leave  things  free,  to  let  the  natural  forces  in 
men's  lives  find  the  places  that  belong  to  them, 
develop  the  powers  that  belong  to  them,  until 
power  in  every  man's  life  shall  be  contagious 
of  power.     In  the  meantime,  having  brought 


IRatural  Selection  in  practice 


117 


out  the  true  and  vital  energies  of  men  as  far  as 
we  go,  if  we  are  obliged  to  be  specialists  in 
knowledge  we  shall  be  specialists  of  the  larger 
sort.  The  powers  of  each  man,  being  actual 
and  genuine  powers,  shall  play  into  the  powers 
of  other  men.  Each  man  that  essays  to  live 
shall  create  for  us  a  splendour  and  beauty  and 
strength  he  was  made  to  create  from  the  be- 
ginning of  the  world. 

To  those  who  sit  in  the  seat  of  the  scornful 
the  somewhat  lyrical  idea  of  an  examination  in 
joy  as  a  basis  of  admission  to  the  typical  college 
appeals  as  a  fit  subject  of  laughter.  So  it  is. 
Having  admitted  the  laugh,  the  question  is, — 
all  human  life  is  questioning  the  college  to-day, 
— which  way  shall  the  laugh  point  ? 

If  the  conditions  of  the  typical  college  do  not 
allow  for  the  working  of  the  laws  of  nature,  so 
much  the  worse  for  the  laws  of  nature,  or  so 
much  the  worse  for  the  college.  In  the  mean- 
time, it  is  good  to  record  that  there  are  many 
signs — thanks  to  these  same  laws  of  nature — 
that  a  most  powerful  reaction  is  setting  in,  not 
only  in  the  colleges  themselves,  but  in  all  the 
forces  of  culture  outside  and  around  them. 
The  examination  in  joy — the  test  of  natural  se- 
lection— is  already  employed  by  all  celebrated 
music  masters  the  world  over  in  the  choosing 
of  pupils,  and  by  all  capable  teachers  of  paint- 
ing; and  the  time  is  not  far  off  when,  so  far  as 
courses  in  literature  are  concerned  (if  the 
teaching  of  literature  is  attempted  in  crowded 


'natural 
Selection 
in  practice 


ii8 


ITbe  Cbilb  anb  Ube  IBooft 


xrbe 

lEmancfpa 

ation 

oftbe 

Ueacbec 


institutions),  the  examination  in  joy  will  be  the 
determining  factor  with  all  the  best  teachers, 
not  only  in  the  conduct  of  their  classes,  but  in 
the  very  structure  of  them.  Structure  is  the 
basis  of  conduct. 


VII 

Zl)c  Emancipation  of  tbe  Zcncbcv 

The  custom  of  mowing  lawns  in  cities,  of 
having  every  grass-blade  in  every  door-yard 
like  every  other  grass-blade,  is  considered  by 
many  persons  as  an  artificial  custom — a  viola- 
tion of  the  law  of  nature.  It  is  contended  that 
the  free-swinging,  wind-blown  grasses  of  the 
fields  are  more  beautiful  and  that  they  give 
more  various  and  infinite  delight  in  colour  and 
line  and  movement.  If  a  piece  of  this  same 
field,  however,  could  be  carefully  cut  out  and 
moved  and  fitted  to  a  city  door-yard — bobolinks 
and  daisies  and  shadows  and  all,  precisely  as 
they  are  —  it  would  not  be  beautiful.  Long 
grass  conforms  to  a  law  of  nature  where  nature 
has  room,  and  short  grass  conforms  to  a  law  of 
nature  where  nature  has  not  room. 

When,  for  whatever  reason,  of  whatever  im- 
portance, men  and  women  choose  to  be  so  close 
together,  that  it  is  not  fitting  they  should  have 
freedom,  and  when  they  choose  to  have  so 
little  room  to  live  in  that  development  is  not 
fitting  lest  it  should  inconvenience  others,  the 


Ube  lEmanclpation  ot  tbe  Ueacber 


119 


penalty  follows.  When  grass-blades  are 
crowded  between  walls  and  fences,  the  more 
they  can  be  made  to  look  alike  the  more  pleas- 
ing they  are,  and  when  an  acre  of  ground  finds 
itself  covered  with  a  thousand  people,  or  a 
teacher  of  culture  finds  himself  mobbed  with 
pupils,  the  law  of  nature  is  the  same.  When- 
ever crowding  of  any  kind  takes  place,  whether 
it  be  in  grass,  ideas,  or  human  nature,  the  most 
pleasing  as  well  as  the  most  convenient  and 
natural  way  of  producing  a  beautiful  effect  is 
with  the  Lawn  Mower.  The  dead  level  is  the 
logic  of  crowded  conditions.  The  city  grades 
down  its  hills  for  the  convenience  of  redu- 
cing its  sewer  problem.  It  makes  its  streets 
into  blocks  for  the  convenience  of  knowing 
where  every  home  is,  and  how  far  it  is,  by  a 
glance  at  a  page,  and,  in  order  that  the  human 
beings  in  it  (one  set  of  innumerable  nobodies 
hurrying  to  another  set  of  innumerable  no- 
bodies) may  never  be  made  to  turn  out  per- 
chance for  an  elm  on  a  sidewalk,  it  cuts  down 
centuries  of  trees,  and  then,  out  of  its  modern 
improvements,  its  map  of  life,  its  woods  in 
rows,  its  wheels  on  tracks,  and  its  souls  in 
pigeonholes  —  out  of  its  huge  Checker-board 
under  the  days  and  nights — it  lifts  its  eyes  to 
the  smoke  in  heaven,  at  last,  and  thanks  God 
it  is  civilised  ! 

The  substantial  fact  in  the  case  would  seem 
to  be  that  every  human  being  bom  into  the 
world  has  a  right  to  be  treated  as  a  special 


Ube 

£mancips 

ation 

of  tbe 

Ueacber 


I20 


Ube  CbilD  an&  XTbe  3Booft 


Ube 

£mandps 

ation 

oftbe 

Ueacber 


creation  all  by  himself.  Society  can  only  be 
said  to  be  truly  civilised  in  proportion  as  it 
acts  on  this  fact.  It  is  because  in  the  family 
each  being  is  treated  as  one  out  of  six  or  seven, 
and  in  the  school  as  one  out  of  six  hundred, 
that  the  family  (with  approximately  good 
parents)  comes  nearer  to  being  a  model  school 
than  anything  we  have. 

If  we  deliberately  prefer  to  live  in  crowds 
for  the  larger  part  of  our  lives,  we  must  expect 
our  lives  to  be  cut  and  fitted  accordingly.  It 
is  an  aesthetic  as  well  as  a  practical  law  that 
this  should  be  so.  The  law  of  nature  where 
there  is  room  for  a  man  to  be  a  man  is  not  the 
law  of  nature  where  there  is  not  room  for  him 
to  be  a  man.  If  there  is  no  playground  for  his 
individual  instincts  except  the  street  he  must 
give  them  up.  Inasmuch  as  natural  selection 
in  overcrowded  conditions  means  selecting 
things  by  taking  them  away  from  others,  it 
can  be  neither  beautiful  nor  useful  to  practise 
it. 

People  who  prefer  to  be  educated  in  masses 
must  conform  to  the  law  of  mass,  which  is  in- 
ertia, and  to  the  law  of  the  herd,  which  is  the 
Dog.  As  long  as  our  prevailing  idea  of  the 
best  elective  is  the  one  with  the  largest  class, 
and  the  prevailing  idea  of  culture  is  the  degree 
from  the  most  crowded  college,  all  natural  gifts, 
whether  in  teachers  or  pupils,  are  under  a 
penalty.  If  we  deliberately  place  ourselves 
where  everything  is  done  by  the  gross,  as  a 


Zbc  Bmanctpatton  ot  tbe  TTeacber 


121 


matter  of  course  and  in  the  nature  of  things 
the  machine-made  man,  taught  by  the  machine- 
made  teacher,  in  a  teaching-machine,  will  con- 
tinue to  be  the  typical  scholar  of  the  modern 
world;  and  the  gentleman-scholar  —  the  man 
who  made  himself,  or  who  gave  God  a  chance 
to  make  him — will  continue  to  be  what  he  is 
now  in  most  of  our  large  teaching  communities 
— an  exception. 

Culture  which  has  not  the  power  to  win  the 
emancipation  of  its  teachers  does  not  produce 
emancipated  and  powerful  pupils.  The  essence 
of  culture  is  selection,  and  the  essence  of  se- 
lection is  natural  selection,  and  teachers  who 
have  not  been  educated  with  natural  selection 
cannot  teach  with  it.  Teachers  who  have 
given  up  being  individuals  in  the  main  activity 
of  their  lives,  who  are  not  allowed  to  be  indi- 
viduals in  their  teaching,  do  not  train  pupils  to 
be  individuals.  Their  pupils,  instead  of  being 
organic  human  beings,  are  manufactured  ones, 
lyiterary  drill  in  college  consists  in  drilling 
every  man  to  be  himself — in  giving  him  the 
freedom  of  himself.  Probably  it  would  be  ad- 
mitted by  most  of  us  who  are  college  graduates 
that  the  teachers  who  loom  up  in  our  lives 
are  those  whom  we  remember  as  emancipated 
teachers — men  who  dared  to  be  individuals  in 
their  daily  work,  and  who,  every  time  they 
touched  us,  helped  us  to  be  individuals. 


Ube 

3Emancipa 

atfon 

of  tbe 

ICeacbet 


122 


Ube  Cbil&  ant)  XTbe  Booft 


Ube  TTeat 
of  Culture 


VIII 

Zhc  ZcBt  of  Culture 

lyooking  at  our  great  institutions  of  learning 
in  a  general  way,  one  might  be  inclined  to  feel 
that  literature  cannot  be  taught  in  them,  be- 
cause the  classes  are  too  large.  When  one 
considers,  however,  the  average  class  in  litera- 
ture, as  it  actually  is,  and  the  things  that  are 
being  taught  in  it,  it  becomes  obvious  that  the 
larger  such  a  class  can  be  made,  and  the  less  the 
pupil  can  be  made  to  get  out  of  it,  the  better. 

The  best  test  of  a  man's  knowledge  of  the 
Spanish  language  would  be  to  put  him  in 
a  balloon  and  set  him  down  in  dark  night 
in  the  middle  of  Spain  and  leave  him  there 
with  his  Spanish  words.  The  best  test  of  a 
man's  knowledge  of  books  is  to  see  what  he 
can  do  without  them  on  a  desert  island  in  the 
sea.  When  the  ship's  library  over  the  blue 
horizon  dwindles  at  last  in  its  cloud  of  smoke 
and  he  is  left  without  a  shred  of  printed  paper 
by  him,  the  supreme  opportunity  of  education 
will  come  to  him.  He  will  learn  how  vital  and 
beautiful,  or  boastful  and  empty,  his  education 
is.  If  it  is  true  education,  the  first  step  he 
takes  he  will  find  a  use  for  it.  The  first  bird 
that  floats  from  its  tree-top  shall  be  a  message 
from  London  straight  to  his  soul.  If  he  has 
truly  known  them,  the  spirits  of  all  his  books 
will  flock  to  him.     If  he  has  known  Shake- 


XTbc  UcBt  ot  Culture 


123 


speare,  the  ghost  of  the  great  master  will  rise 
from  beneath  its  Stratford  stone,  and  walk 
oceans  to  be  with  him.  If  he  knows  Homer, 
Homer  is  full  of  Odysseys  trooping  across  the 
seas.  Shall  he  sit  him  down  on  the  rocks,  lift 
his  voice  like  a  mere  librarian,  and,  like  a 
book-raised,  paper-pampered,  ink-hungry  babe 
cry  to  the  surf  for  a  Greek  dictionary  ?  The 
rhythm  of  the  beach  is  Greece  to  him,  and  the 
singing  of  the  great  Greek  voice  is  on  the  tops 
of  waves  around  the  world. 

A  man's  culture  is  his  knowledge  become 
himself.  It  is  in  the  seeing  of  his  eyes  and  the 
hearing  of  his  ears  and  the  use  of  his  hands. 
Is  there  not  always  the  altar  of  the  heavens 
and  the  earth  ?  I^aying  down  days  and  nights 
of  joy  before  it  and  of  beauty  and  wonder  and 
peace,  the  scholar  is  always  a  scholar,  i.  e. ,  he 
is  always  at  home.  To  be  cultured  is  to  be  so 
splendidly  wrought  of  body  and  soul  as  to  get 
the  most  joy  out  of  the  least  and  the  fewest 
things.  Wherever  he  happens  to  be, — what- 
ever he  happens  to  be  without, — his  culture  is 
his  being  master.  He  may  be  naked  before 
the  universe,  and  it  may  be  a  pitiless  universe 
or  a  gracious  one,  but  he  is  always  master, 
knowing  how  to  live  in  it,  knowing  how  to 
hunger  and  die  in  it,  or,  like  Stevenson,  smiling 
out  of  his  poor,  worn  body  to  it.  He  is  the 
unconquerable  man.  Wherever  he  is  in  the 
world,  he  cannot  be  old  in  the  presence  of 
the  pageant  of  lyife.     From  behind  the  fading 


Ube  Uest 
of  Culture 


124 


Ube  CbilD  ant)  TLbc  JBooft 


Summary  of  his  face  he  watches  it,  child  after  child, 
spring  after  spring  as  it  flies  before  him;  he 
will  not  grow  old  while  it  still  passes  by. 
It  carries  delight  across  to  him  to  the  end. 
He  watches  and  sings  with  it  to  the  end,  down 
to  the  edge  of  sleep. 

A  bird's  shadow  is  enough  to  be  happy  with, 
if  a  man  is  educated,  or  the  flicker  of  light  on  a 
leaf,  and  when  really  a  song  is  being  lived  in 
a  man,  all  nature  plays  its  accompaniment. 
To  possess  one's  own  senses,  to  know  how  to 
conduct  one's  self,  is  to  be  the  conductor  of 
orchestras  in  the  clouds  and  in  the  grass.  The 
trained  man  is  not  dependent  on  having  the 
thing  itself.  He  borrows  the  boom  of  the  sea 
to  live  with,  anywhere,  and  the  gladness  of 
continents. 

Literary  training  consists  in  the  acquiring  of 
a  state  of  mind  and  body  to  feel  the  universe 
with ;  in  becoming  an  athlete  toward  beauty,  a 
giver  of  great  lifts  of  joy  to  this  poor,  strain- 
ing, stumbling  world  with  its  immemorial  bur- 
den on  its  back,  which,  going  round  and  round, 
for  the  most  part  with  its  eyes  shut,  between 
infinities,  is  the  hope  and  sorrow  of  all  of  us 
for  the  very  reason  that  its  eyes  are  shut. 


IX 

Summary 

The  proper  conditions  for  literary  drill  in 
college  would  seem  to  sum  themselves  up  in 


Summary 


125 


the  general  idea  that  literature  is  the  spirit  of 
life.  It  can  therefore  only  be  taught  through 
the  spirit. 

First,  It  can  only  be  taught  through  the 
spirit  by  being  taught  as  an  art,  through  its 
own  nature  and  activity,  reproductively — giv- 
ing the  spirit  body.  Both  the  subject-matter 
and  the  method  in  true  literary  drill  can  only 
be  based  on  the  study  of  human  experience. 
The  intense  study  of  human  experience  in  a 
college  course  may  be  fairly  said  to  involve 
three  things  that  must  be  daily  made  possible 
to  the  pupil  in  college  life.  Everything  that  is 
given  him  to  do,  and  everything  that  happens 
to  him  in  college,  should  cultivate  these  three 
things  in  the  pupil:  (i)  Personality — an  in- 
tense first  person  singular,  as  a  centre  for 
having  experience;  (2)  Imagination  —  the  na- 
tural organ  in  the  human  soul  for  realising 
what  an  experience  is  and  for  combining  and 
condensing  it;  (3)  The  habit  of  having  time 
and  room,  for  re-experiencing  an  experience  at 
will  in  the  imagination,  until  the  experience 
becomes  so  powerful  and  vivid,  so  fully  realises 
itself  in  the  mind,  that  the  owner  of  the  mind 
is  an  artist  with  his  mind.  When  he  puts  the 
experience  of  his  mind  down  it  becomes  more 
real  to  other  men  on  paper  than  their  own  ex- 
periences are  to  them  in  their  own  lives. 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  point  out  that  what- 
ever our  conventional  courses  in  literature  may 
be  doing,  whether  in  college  or  anywhere  else. 


Summaing 


126 


XTbe  Cbtlb  mt>  XTbe  Booft 


Summary  they  are  not  bringing  out  this  creative  joy  and 
habit  of  creative  joy  in  the  pupils.  Those  who 
are  interested  in  literature-courses — such  as  we 
have — for  the  most  part  do  not  believe  in  try- 
ing to  bring  out  the  creative  joy  of  each  pupil. 
Those  who  might  believe  in  trying  to  do  it 
do  not  believe  it  can  be  done.  They  do  not 
believe  it  can  be  done  because  they  do  not 
realise  that  in  the  case  of  each  and  every  pupil 
— so  far  as  he  goes — it  is  the  only  thing  worth 
doing.  They  fail  to  see  from  behind  their 
commentaries  and  from  out  of  their  footnotes, 
the  fact  that  the  one  object  in  studying  litera- 
ture is  joy,  that  the  one  way  of  studying  and 
knowing  literature  is  joy,  and  that  the  one 
way  to  attain  joy  is  to  draw  out  creative  joy. 

Second.  And  if  literature  is  to  be  taught  as 
an  art  it  must  be  taught  as  a  way  of  life.  As 
long  as  literature  and  life  continue  to  be  con- 
ceived and  taught  as  being  separate  things, 
there  can  be  no  wide  and  beautiful  hope  for 
either  of  them.  The  organs  of  literature  are 
precisely  the  same  organs  and  they  are  trained 
on  precisely  the  same  principles  as  the  organs 
of  life. 

Kxcept  an  education  in  books  can  bring  to 
pass  the  right  condition  of  these  organs,  a 
state  of  being  in  the  pupil,  his  knowledge  of 
no  matter  how  long  a  list  of  masterpieces  is 
but  a  catalogue  of  the  names  of  things  for  ever 
left  out  of  his  life.  It  is  little  wonder,  when 
the  drudgery  has  done  its  work  and  the  sorry 


Summary? 


127 


show  is  over,  and  the  victim  of  the  System  is 
face  to  face  with  his  empty  soul  at  last,  if  in 
his  earlier  years  at  least  he  seems  overfond  to 
some  of  us  of  receiving  medals,  honours,  and 
valedictories  for  what  he  might  have  been  and 
of  flourishing  a  Degree  for  what  he  has  missed. 

There  was  once  a  Master  of  Arts, 

Who  was  *'  nuts"  upon  cranberry  tarts: 

When  he  'd  eaten  his  fill 

He  was  awfully  ill. 
But  he  was  still  a  Master  of  Arts. 


Summary 


The  power  and  habit  of  studying  and  enjoy- 
ing human  nature  as  it  lives  around  us,  is  not 
only  a  more  human  and  alive  occupation,  but 
it  is  a  more  literary  one  than  becoming  another 
editor  of  ^schylus  or  going  down  to  posterity 
in  footnotes  as  one  of  the  most  prominent  bores 
that  Shakespeare  ever  had.  If  a  teacher  of 
literature  enjoys  being  the  editor  of  -^schylus, 
or  if  he  is  happier  in  appearing  on  a  title-page 
with  a  poet  than  he  could  possibly  be  in  being 
a  poet,  it  is  personally  well  enough,  though  it 
may  be  a  disaster  to  the  rest  of  us  and  to 
^schylus.  Men  who  can  be  said  as  a  class  to 
care  more  about  literature  than  they  do  about 
life,  who  prefer  the  paper  side  of  things  to  the 
real  one,  are  at  liberty  as  private  persons  to  be 
editors  and  footnote  hunters  to  the  top  of  their 
bent;  but  why  should  they  call  it  **  The  Study 
of  lyiterature, "  to  teach  their  pupils  to  be  foot- 
note hunters  and  editors?  and  how  can  they 


128 


XTbe  CbilD  an^  XLbc  Book 


Summary  possibly  teach  anything  else?  and  do  they 
teach  anything  else  ?  And  if  good  teachers  can 
only  teach  what  they  have,  what  shall  we  ex- 
pect of  poor  ones  ? 

In  the  meantime  the  Manufacture  of  the 
Cultured  Mind  is  going  ruthlessly  on,  and 
thousands  of  young  men  and  women  who,  left 
alone  with  the  masters  of  literature,  might  be 
engaged  in  accumulating  and  multiplying  in- 
spiration, are  engaged  in  analysing — dividing 
what  inspiration  they  have;  and,  in  the  one 
natural,  creative  period  of  their  lives,  their 
time  is  entirely  spent  in  learning  how  inspired 
work  was  done,  or  how  it  might  have  been 
done,  or  how  it  should  have  been  done;  in  ab- 
sorbing everything  about  it  except  its  spirit — 
the  power  that  did  it — the  power  that  makes 
being  told  how  to  do  it  uncalled  for,  the  power 
that  asks  and  answers  its  '  *  Hows  ?  "  for  itself. 
The  serene  powerlessness  of  it  all,  without 
courage  or  passion  or  conviction,  without  self- 
discovery  in  it,  or  self-forgetfulness  or  beauty 
in  it,  or  for  one  moment  the  great  contagion  of 
the  great,  is  one  of  the  saddest  sights  in  this 
modern  day. 

In  the  meantime  the  most  practical  thing  that 
can  be  done  with  the  matter  of  literary  drill  in 
college  is  to  turn  the  eye  of  the  public  on  it. 
Methods  will  change  when  ideals  change,  and 
ideals  will  change  when  the  public  clearly  sees 
ideals,  and  when  the  public  encourages  colleges 
that  see  them.     The  time  is  not  far  off  when  it 


Summari^ 


129 


will  be  admitted  by  all  concerned  that  the 
true  study  of  masterpieces  consists,  and  always 
must  consist,  in  communing  with  the  things 
that  masterpieces  are  about,  in  the  learning 
and  applying  of  the  principles  of  human  nature, 
in  a  passion  for  real  persons,  and  in  a  daily 
loving  of  the  face  of  the  universe. 

This  idea  may  not  be  considered  very  practi- 
cal. It  stands  for  a  kind  of  education  in  which 
it  is  difficult  to  exhibit  in  rows  actual  results. 
We  are  not  contending  for  an  education  that 
looks  practical.  We  are  contending  merely 
for  education  that  will  be  true  and  beautiful 
and  natural.  It  will  be  practical  the  way  the 
forces  of  nature  are  practical — whether  any  one 
notices  it  or  not. 

The  following  announcement  can  already  be 
seen  on  the  bulletin  boards  of  universities 
around  the  world( — if  looked  for  twice). 

They  ark  Coming  !  O  Shades  of  lycarn- 
ing.  The  I^ovkrs  of  Joy,  Imperious  with 
Joy,  Unconquerabi^e  ! 

Their  Sails  are  Flocking  the  E)ast. 

The  High  Seas  are  Theirs. 

They  shall  command  you,  overwhelm  you. 
Book-lubbers,  paper-plodders,  shall  be  as 
though  they  were  not.  The  youth  of  the 
earth  shall  be  renewed  in  the  morning,  the 
suns  and  the  stars  shall  be  unlocked,  and 
the  evening  shall  go  forth  with  joy.  The 
mountains  shall  be  freed  from  the  pick  and 
the  shovel  and  the  book,  and  lift  themselves 


Summarig 


I30 


Ubc  CbiU>  mt>  Ubc  JBooft 


B  fiote  to  heaven.  Flowers  shall  again  outblossom 
botanies,  and  gymnasts  of  music  shall  be  laid 
low,  and  Birds  Through  An  Opera  Glass  shall 
sing.  Joy  shall  come  to  knowledge,  and  the 
strength  of  Joy  upon  it.  Thky  are:  Coming, 
O  Ye  Shades  of  I^earning,  a  thousand  thou- 
sand strong.  Their  sails  flock  the  Sea.  The 
smoke  and  the  throb  of  their  engines  is  the 
promise  of  the  east.  The  days  of  thirteen- 
thousand-ton,  three-horse-power  education  are 
numbered. 


X 

a  mote 


It  is  one  of  the  danger  signs  of  the  times  that 
the  men  who  have  most  closely  observed  our 
modern  life,  in  its  social,  industrial,  artistic, 
educational,  and  religious  aspects  seem  to  be 
gradually  coming  to  the  point  where  they  all 
but  take  it  for  granted  in  considering  all  social, 
industrial,  and  educational  and  political  ques- 
tions, that  the  conditions  of  modern  times  are 
such,  and  are  going  to  be  such  that  imagina- 
tion and  personality  might  as  well  be  dropped 
as  practical  forces — forces  that  must  be  reck- 
oned with  in  the  movement  of  human  life. 
Nearly  all  the  old-time  outlooks  of  the  Soul, 
as  they  stand  in  history,  have  been  taken  for 
factory  sites,  bought  up  by  syndicates,  moral 
and  otherwise,  and  are  being  used  for  chim- 


a  mote 


131 


neys.  Nothing  but  smoke  and  steel  and 
wooden  Things  come  out  of  them.  Poets  and 
brokers  are  both  telling  us  on  every  hand  that 
imagination  is  impossible  and  personality  in- 
credible in  modern  life. 

Imagination  and  personality  are  the  spirit 
and  the  dust  out  of  which  all  great  nations  and 
all  great  religions  are  made. 

The  attempt  has  been  made  in  the  foregoing 
pages  to  point  out  that  they  are  not  dead. 
The  Altar  smoulders. 

In  pointing  out  how  imagination  and  per- 
sonality can  be  wrought  into  one  single  branch 
of  a  man's  education — his  relation  to  books — 
principles  may  have  been  suggested  which  can 
be  concretely  applied  by  all  of  us,  each  in 
our  own  department,  to  the  education  of  the 
whole  man. 


Bmote 


^33 


Part  II 

possibtltttes 


Zbc  1l00ue 

I  DREAMED  I  lived  in  a  day  when  men 
dared  have  visions.  I  lay  in  a  great  white 
Silence  as  one  who  waited  for  something. 

And  as  I  lay  and  waited,  the  Silence  groped 
toward  me  and  I  felt  it  gathering  nearer  and 
nearer  about  me. 

Then  it  folded  me  to  Itself. 

I  made  Time  my  bedside. 

And  it  seemed  to  me,  when  I  had  rested  my 
soul  with  years,  and  when  I  had  found  Space 
and  had  stretched  myself  upon  it,  I  awoke. 

I  lay  in  a  great  white  empty  place,  and  the 
whole  world  like  solemn  music  came  to  me. 

And  I  looked,  and  behold  in  the  shadow  of 
the  earth,  which  came  and  went,  I  saw  Human 
Lives  being  tossed  about.  On  the  solemn 
rhythmic  music,  back  and  forth,  I  saw  them 
lifted  across  Silence. 

And  I  said  to  my  Spirit,  "  What  is  it  they 
are  doing  ?  ' ' 


35 


XLbc  f  £0ue 


136 


XTbe  Gbil^  anO  Ubc  Booft 


Ube  Issue 


"  They  are  living,"  the  Spirit  said. 
So  they  floated  before  me  while  The  Great 
Shadow  came  and  went. 


O  my  Soul,  hast  thou  forgotten  thy  days 
in  the  world,  when  thou  didst  watch  the  pro- 
cessional of  it,  when  the  faces  —  day-lighted, 
night-lighted,  faces — trooped  before  thee,  and 
thou  didst  look  upon  them  and  delight  in 
them  ?    What  didst  thou  see  in  the  world  ?  " 

* '  I  saw  Two  Immeasurable  Hands  in  it, ' ' 
said  my  Soul,  "  over  every  man.  I  saw  that 
the  man  did  not  see  the  Hands.  I  saw  that 
they  reached  out  of  infinity  for  him  down 
through  the  days  and  the  nights.  And 
whether  he  slept  or  prayed  or  wrought,  I  saw 
that  they  still  reached  out  for  him,  and  folded 
themselves  about  him." 

And  I  asked  God  what  The  Hands  were. 

'*  The  man  calls  them  Heredity  and  Environ- 
ment," God  said. 

And  God  laughed. 

Words  came  from  far  for  me  and  waited  in 
tumult  within  me.  But  my  mouth  was  filled 
with  silence. 


I  know  that  I  do  not  know  the  world,  but 
out  of  my  little  corner  of  time  and  space  I  have 
watched  in  it, — watched  men  and  truths  strug- 
gling in  it,  and  in  the  struggle  it  has  seemed 
to  me  I  have  seen  three  kinds  of  men.     I  have 


Ube  ITssue 


137 


seen  the  man  who  feels  that  he  is  being  made, 
and  the  man  who  feels  that  he  is  making  him- 
self. But  I  have  seen  also  another  kind  of 
man — the  man  who  feels  that  the  Universe  is 
at  work  on  him,  but  (within  limits)  under  his 
own  supervision. 

I  have  made  a  compact  in  my  soul  with  this 
man,  for  a  new  world.  He  is  not  willing  to 
be  a  mere  manufactured  man — one  more  being 
turned  out  from  The  Factory  of  Circumstance — 
neither  does  he  think  very  much  of  the  man 
who  makes  himself — who  could  make  himself. 
If  he  were  to  try  such  a  thing — try  to  make  a 
man  himself,  he  would  really  rather  try  it,  if 
the  truth  must  be  told,  on  some  one  else. 

As  near  as  he  can  define  it,  life  seems  to  be 
(to  the  normal  or  inspired  man)  a  kind  of  alter- 
nate grasping  and  being  grasped.  Sometimes 
he  feels  his  destiny  tossed  between  the  Two 
Immeasurable  Hands.  Sometimes  he  feels 
that  they  have  paused — that  the  Immeasurable 
Hands  have  been  lent  to  him,  that  the  toss  of 
destiny  is  made  his  own. 

He  watches  these  two  great  forces  playing 
under  heaven,  before  his  eyes,  with  his  im- 
mortal life,  every  day.  His  soul  takes  these 
powers  of  heaven,  as  the  mariner  takes  the 
winds  of  the  sea.  He  tacks  to  destiny.  He 
takes  the  same  attitude  toward  the  laws  of 
heredity  and  environment  that  the  Creator 
took  when  He  made  them.  He  takes  it  for 
granted  that  a  God  who  made  these  laws  as 


Ube  f  ssue 


138 


XTbe  CbilD  anD  TLbc  3Booft 


Selection 


conveniences  for  Himself,  in  running  a  Uni- 
verse, must  have  intended  them  for  men  as 
conveniences  in  living  in  it.  In  proportion  as 
men  have  been  like  God  they  have  treated 
these  laws  as  He  does  —  as  conveniences. 
Thousands  of  men  are  doing  it  to-day.  Men 
did  it  for  thousands  of  years  before  they  knew 
what  the  laws  were,  when  they  merely  fol- 
lowed their  instincts  with  them.  In  a  man's 
answer  to  the  question,  How  can  I  make  a 
convenience  of  the  law  of  heredity  and  environ- 
ment ?— education  before  being  born  and  edu- 
cation after  being  born — will  be  found  to  lie 
always  the  secret  glory  or  the  secret  shame  of 
his  life. 

II 


Zhc  3fir0t  Selection 

If  the  souls  of  the  unborn  could  go  about 
reconnoitering  the  earth  a  little  before  they 
settled  on  it,  selecting  the  parents  they  would 
have,  the  places  where  it  pleased  them  to  be 
born,  nine  out  of  ten  of  them  (judging  from 
the  way  they  conduct  themselves  in  the  flesh) 
would  spend  nearly  all  their  time  in  looking 
for  the  best  house  and  street  to  be  born  in, 
the  best  things  to  be  born  to.  Such  a  little 
matter  as  selecting  the  right  parents  would  be 
left,  probably,  to  the  last  moment,  or  they 
would  expect  it  to  be  thrown  in. 

We  are  all  of  us  more  or  less  aware,  es- 


Conveniences 


139 


pecially  as  we  advance  in  life,  that  overlook- 
ing the  importance  of  parents  is  a  mistake. 
There  have  been  times  in  the  lives  of  some  of 
us  when  having  parents  at  all  seemed  a  mis- 
take. We  can  remember  hours  when  we  were 
sure  we  had  the  wrong  ones.  After  our  first  dis- 
appointment,— that  is,  when  we  have  learned 
how  unmanageable  parents  are, — we  have  our 
time — most  of  us — of  making  comparisons,  of 
trying  other  people's  parents  on.  This  cannot 
be  said  to  work  very  well,  taken  as  a  whole, 
and  it  is  generally  admitted  that  people  who 
are  most  serious  about  it,  who  take  unto  them- 
selves fathers-  and  mothers-in-law  seldom  do 
any  better  than  at  first.  The  conclusion  of  the 
whole  matter  would  seem  to  be :  Since  a  man 
cannot  select  his  parents  and  his  parents  can- 
not select  him,  he  must  select  himself. 
That  is  what  books  are  for. 


Cons 
veniencee 


III 

Conveniences 


It  is  the  first  importance  of  a  true  book  that 
a  man  can  select  his  neighbours  with  it, — can 
overcome  space,  riches,  poverty,  and  time  with 
it, — and  the  grave,  and  break  bread  with  the 
dead.  A  book  is  a  portable  miracle.  It 
makes  a  man's  native  place  all  over  for  him, 
for  a  dollar  and  a  quarter;  and  many  a  man  in 
this  somewhat  hard  and  despairing  world  has 


140 


Ubc  Cbtlb  an&  Zbc  Booft 


Cona 
veniences 


been  furnished  with  a  new  heaven  and  a  new 
earth  for  twenty-five  cents.  Out  of  a  public 
library  he  has  felt  reached  down  to  him  the 
grasp  of  heroes.  Hurrying  home  in  the  night, 
perhaps,  with  his  tiny  life  hid  under  stars, 
but  with  a  Book  under  his  arm,  he  has  felt  a 
Greeting  against  his  breast  and  held  it  tight. 
'*  Who  art  thou,  my  lad  ?  "  it  said;  **  who  art 
thou?"  And  the  saying  was  not  forgotten. 
If  it  is  true  that  the  spirits  of  the  mighty  dead 
are  abroad  in  the  night  they  are  turning  the 
leaves  of  books. 

There  are  other  inspiring  things  in  the 
world,  but  there  is  nothing  else  that  carries 
itself  among  the  sons  of  men  like  the  book. 
With  such  divine  plenteousness — seeds  of  the 
worlds  in  it — it  goes  about  flocking  on  the 
souls  of  men.  There  is  something  so  broad- 
cast, so  universal  about  the  way  of  a  book  with 
a  man:  boundless,  subtle,  ceaseless,  irresistible, 
following  him  and  loving  him,  renewing  him, 
delighting  in  him  and  hoping  for  him — like  a 
god.  It  is  as  the  way  of  Nature  herself  with 
a  man.  One  cannot  always  feel  it,  but  some- 
how, when  I  am  really  living  a  real  day,  I  feel 
as  if  some  Great  Book  were  around  me — were 
always  around  me.  I  feel  myself  all-enfolded, 
penetrated,  surrounded  with  it  —  the  vast, 
gentle  force  of  it — sky  and  earth  of  it.  It  is  as 
if  I  saw  it,  sometimes,  building  new  boundaries 
for  me,  out  there — softly,  gently,  on  the  edges 
of  the  night — for  me  and  for  all  human  life. 


Conveniences 


141 


Other  inspiring  things  seem  to  be  less  stead- 
fast for  us.  They  cannot  always  free  them- 
selves and  then  come  and  free  us.  Music 
cannot  be  depended  upon.  It  sings  sometimes 
for  and  sometimes  against  us.  Sometimes, 
also,  music  is  still — absolutely  still,  all  the  way 
down  from  the  stars  to  the  grass.  At  best  it  is 
for  some  people  and  for  others  not,  and  is  ad- 
dicted to  places.  It  is  a  part  of  the  air — part 
of  the  climate  in  Germany,  but  there  is  but 
one  country  in  the  world  made  for  listening  in 
— where  any  one,  every  one  listens,  the  way 
one  breathes.  The  great  pictures  inspire,  on 
the  whole,  but  few  people — most  of  them  with 
tickets.  Cathedrals  cannot  be  unmoored,  have 
never  been  seen  by  the  majority  of  men  at 
all,  except  in  dreams  and  photographs.  Most 
mountains  (for  all  practical  purposes)  are 
private  property.  The  sea  (a  look  at  the 
middle  of  it)  is  controlled  by  two  or  three 
syndicates.  The  sky — the  last  stronghold  of 
freedom  —  is  rented  out  for  the  most  part, 
where  most  men  live — in  cities;  and  in  New 
York  and  London  the  people  who  can  afiFord 
it  pay  taxes  for  air,  and  grass  is  a  dollar  a 
blade.  Being  born  is  the  only  really  free  thing 
— and  dying.  Next  to  these  in  any  just  esti- 
mate of  the  comparatively  free  raw  material 
that  goes  to  the  making  of  a  human  life  comes 
the  printed  book. 

A  library,  on  the  whole,  is  the  purest  and 
most  perfect  form  of  power  that  exists,  because 


Con* 
veniences 


142 


XTbe  Cbtl&  anb  Xlbe  Booft 


Cons 
vcniences 


it  is  a  lever  on  the  nature  of  things.  If  a  man 
is  born  with  the  wrong  neighbours  it  brings 
the  right  ones  flocking  to  him.  It  is  the  uni- 
verse to  order.  It  makes  the  world-  like  a 
globe  in  a  child's  hands.  He  turns  up  the 
part  where  he  chooses  to  live — now  one  way 
and  now  another,  that  he  may  delight  in  it  and 
live  in  it.  If  he  is  a  poet  it  is  the  meaning  of 
life  to  him  that  he  can  keep  on  turning  it  until 
he  has  delighted  and  tasted  and  lived  in  all  of  it. 
The  second  importance  of  true  books  is  that 
they  are  not  satisfied  with  the  first.  They  are 
not  satisfied  to  be  used  to  influence  a  man  from 
the  outside — as  a  kind  of  house-furnishing  for 
his  soul.  A  true  book  is  never  a  mere  con- 
trivance for  arranging  the  right  bit  of  sky  for 
a  man  to  live  his  life  under,  or  the  right  neigh- 
bours for  him  to  live  his  life  with.  It  goes 
deeper  than  this.  A  mere  playing  upon  a 
man's  environment  does  not  seem  to  satisfy  a 
true  book.  It  plays  upon  the  latent  infinity 
in  the  man  himself.  The  majority  of  men  are 
not  merely  conceived  in  sin  and  born  in  lies, 
but  they  are  the  lies;  and  lies  as  well  as  truths 
flow  in  their  veins.  Lies  hold  their  souls  back 
thousands  of  years.  When  one  considers  the 
actual  facts  about  most  men,  the  law  of  en- 
vironment seems  a  clumsy  and  superficial  law 
enough.  If  all  that  a  book  can  do  is  to  appeal 
to  the  law  of  environment  for  a  man,  it  does 
not  do  very  much.  The  very  trees  and  stones 
do  better  for  him,  and  the  little  birds  in  their 


Gonventences 


143 


nests.  No  possible  amount  of  environment 
crowded  on  their  frail  souls  would  ever  make 
it  possible  for  most  men  to  catch  up — to  over- 
take enough  truth  before  they  die  to  make 
their  seventy  years  worth  while.  The  maj  ority 
of  men  (one  hardly  dares  to  deny)  can  be  seen, 
sooner  or  later,  drifting  down  to  death  either 
bitterly  or  indifferently.  The  shadows  of  their 
lives  haunt  us  a  little,  then  they  vanish  away 
from  us  and  from  the  sound  of  our  voices. 
Oh,  God,  from  behind  Thy  high  heaven — from 
out  of  Thy  infinite  wealth  of  years,  hast  Thou 
but  the  one  same  pittance  of  threescore  and 
ten  for  every  man  ?  Some  of  us  are  born  with 
the  handicap  of  a  thousand  years  woven  in  the 
nerves  of  our  bodies,  the  swiftness  of  our 
minds,  and  the  delights  of  our  limbs.  Others 
of  us  are  born  with  the  thousand  years  binding 
us  down  to  blindness  and  hobbling,  holding  us 
back  to  disease,  but  all  with  the  same  Imperi- 
ous Timepiece  held  above  us,  to  run  the  same 
race,  to  overtake  the  same  truth — before  the 
iron  curtain  and  the  dark.  Some  of  us— a  few 
men  in  every  generation — have  two  or  three 
hundred  years  given  to  us  outright  the  day  we 
are  born.  Then  we  are  given  seventy  more. 
Others  of  us  have  two  hundred  years  taken 
away  from  us  the  day  we  are  born.  Then  we 
are  given  seventy  years  to  make  them  up  in, 
and  it  is  called  life. 

If  we  are  to  shut  ourselves  up  with  one  law, 
either  the  law  of  environment  or  the  law  of 


Cons 
veniences 


144 


Ube  Cbil&  an^  XTbe  Booft 


Cona 
venfences 


heredity,  it  is  obvious  that  the  best  a  logical 
man  could  do,  would  be  to  be  ashamed  of  a 
universe  like  this  and  creep  out  of  it  as  soon  as 
he  could.  The  great  glory  of  a  great  book  is, 
that  it  will  not  let  itself  be  limited  to  the  law 
of  environment  in  dealing  with  a  man.  It 
deals  directly  with  the  man  himself.  It  ap- 
peals to  the  law  of  heredity.  It  reaches  down 
into  the  infinite  depth  of  his  life.  If  a  man 
has  started  a  life  with  parents  he  had  better 
not  have  (for  all  practical  purposes),  it  fur- 
nishes him  with  better  ones.  It  picks  and 
chooses  in  behalf  of  his  life  out  of  his  very 
grandfathers,  for  him.  It  not  only  supplies 
him  with  a  new  set  of  neighbours  as  often  as 
he  wants  them.  It  sees  that  he  is  born  again 
every  morning  on  the  wide  earth  and  that  he 
has  a  new  set  of  parents  to  be  born  to.  It  is 
a  part  of  the  infinite  and  irrepressible  hopeful- 
ness of  this  mortal  life  that  each  man  of  us  who 
dwells  on  the  earth  is  the  child  of  an  infinite 
marriage.  We  are  all  equipped,  even  the 
poorest  of  us,  from  the  day  we  begin,  with  an 
infinite  number  of  fathers  and  an  infinite  num- 
ber of  mothers — no  telling,  as  we  travel  down 
the  3^ears,  which  shall  happen  to  us  next.  If 
what  we  call  heredity  were  a  matter  of  a  few 
months, — a  narrow,  pitiful,  two-parent  affair, — 
if  the  fate  of  a  human  being  could  be  shut  in 
with  what  one  man  and  one  woman,  playing 
and  working,  eating  and  drinking,  under 
heaven,   for  a  score  of  years  or  more,   would 


Conveniences 


145 


be  likely  to  have  to  give  him  from  out  of  their 
very  selves,  heredity  would  certainly  be  a 
whimsical,  unjust,  undignified  law  to  come 
into  a  world  by,  to  don  an  immortal  soul 
with.  A  man  who  has  had  his  life  so  reck- 
lessly begun  for  him  could  hardly  be  blamed 
for  being  reckless  with  it  afterward.  But  it 
is  not  true  that  the  principle  of  heredity  in  a 
human  life  can  be  confined  to  a  single  acci- 
dent in  it.  We  are  all  infinite,  and  our 
very  accidents  are  infinite.  In  the  very  flesh 
and  bones  of  our  bodies  we  are  infinite  — 
brought  from  the  furthest  reaches  of  eternity 
and  the  utmost  bounds  of  created  life  to  be 
ourselves.  If  we  were  to  do  nothing  else  for 
threescore  years,  it  is  not  in  our  human  breath 
to  recite  our  fathers'  names  upon  our  lips. 
Each  of  us  is  the  child  of  an  infinite  mother, 
and  from  her  breast,  veiled  in  a  thousand  years, 
we  draw  life,  glory,  sorrow,  sleep,  and  death. 
The  ones  we  call  fathers  and  mothers  are  but 
ambassadors  to  us — delegates  from  a  million 
graves — appointed  for  our  birth.  Every  boy  is 
a  summed-up  multitude.  The  infinite  crowd 
of  his  fathers  beckons  for  him.  As  in  some 
vast  amphitheatre  he  lives  his  life,  before  the 
innumerable  audience  of  the  dead — each  from 
its  circle  of  centuries — calls  to  him,  contends 
for  him,  draws  him  to  himself. 

Inasmuch  as  every  man  who  is  born  in  the 
world  is  bom  with  an  infinite  outfit  for  living 
in  it,  it  is  the  ofl&ce  of  all  books  that  are  true  and 


Cona 
veniences 


146 


XTbe  CbtlD  an&  XTbe  3Boofi 


Ube 

Cbartec  of 

possibility 


beautiful  books — true  to  the  spirit  of  a  man — 
that  they  shall  play  upon  the  latent  infinity  in 
him;  that  they  shall  help  him  to  select  his 
largest  self;  that  they  shall  help  him  to  give, 
as  the  years  go  on,  the  right  accent  to  the  right 
fathers,  in  his  life. 

Books  are  more  close  to  the  latent  infinity  in 
a  human  being  than  anything  else  can  be,  be- 
cause the  habit  of  the  infinite  is  their  habit. 
As  books  are  more  independent  of  space  and 
time  than  all  other  known  forces  in  the  lives 
of  men,  they  seem  to  make  all  the  men  who 
love  them  independent  also.  If  a  man  has  not 
room  for  his  life,  he  takes  a  book  and  makes 
room  for  it.  When  the  habit  of  books  becomes 
the  habit  of  a  man  he  unhands  himself  at  will 
from  space  and  time;  he  finds  the  universe  is 
his  universe.  He  finds  ancestors  and  neigh- 
bours alike  flocking  to  him — doing  his  bidding. 
God  Himself  says  "  Yes"  to  him  and  delights 
in  him.  He  has  entered  into  conspiracy  with 
the  nature  of  things.  He  does  not  feel  that  he 
is  being  made.  He  does  not  feel  that  he  is 
making  himself.  The  universe  is  at  work  on 
him — under  his  own  supervision. 


IV 

Z\)c  Cbarter  of  poe^ibUlti? 


In  reading  to  select  one's  parents  and  one's 
self,  there  seem  to  be  two  instincts  involved. 


XTbe  Cbarter  ot  possibility 


147 


These  instincts  may  vary  more  or  less  accord- 
ing to  the  book  and  the  mood  of  the  reader,  but 
the  object  of  all  live  reading — of  every  live  ex- 
perience with  a  book — is  the  satisfying  of  one 
or  both  of  them.  A  man  whose  reading  means 
something  to  him  is  either  letting  himself  go 
in  a  book  or  letting  himself  come  in  it.  He  is 
either  reading  himself  out  or  reading  himself 
in.  It  is  as  if  every  human  life  were  a  kind 
of  port  on  the  edge  of  the  universe,  when 
it  reads,  —  possible  selves  outward  -  bound 
and  inward-bound  trooping  before  It.  Some 
of  these  selves  are  exports  and  some  are  im- 
ports. 

If  the  principle  of  selection  is  conceived  in  a 
large  enough  spirit,  and  is  set  in  operation  soon 
enough,  and  is  continued  long  enough,  there  is 
not  a  child  that  can  be  born  on  the  earth  who 
shall  not  be  able  to  determine  by  the  use  of 
books,  in  the  course  of  the  years,  what  manner 
of  man  he  shall  be.  He  may  not  be  able  to 
determine  how  soon  he  shall  be  that  man,  or 
how  much  of  that  man  shall  be  fulfilled  in  him- 
self before  he  dies,  and  how  much  of  him  shall 
be  left  over  to  be  fulfilled  in  his  children,  but 
the  fact  remains  that  to  an  extraordinary  de- 
gree, through  a  live  use  of  books,  not  only  a 
man's  education  after  he  is  born,  but  his  edu- 
cation before  he  is  born,  is  placed  in  his  hands. 
It  is  the  supreme  office  of  books  that  they  do 
this;  that  they  place  the  laws  of  heredity  and 
environment  where  a  man  with  a  determined 


Ube 
Charter  ot 
|>o0sibiUts 


148 


ITbe  CbilD  anb  Ube  JBooft 


Ubc 

Cbartet  of 

pO00fbiIftig 


spirit  can  do  something  besides  cringing  to 
them.  Neither  environment  nor  heredity  — 
taken  by  itself— can  give  a  man  a  determined 
spirit,  but  it  is  everything  to  know  that,  given 
a  few  books  and  the  determined  spirit  both,  a 
man  can  have  any  environment  he  wants  for 
living  his  life,  and  his  own  assorted  ancestors 
for  living  it.  It  is  only  by  means  of  books 
that  a  man  can  keep  from  living  a  partitioned- 
off  life  in  the  world — can  keep  toned  up  to  the 
divine  sense  of  possibility  in  it.  We  hear  great 
men  every  day,  across  space  and  time,  halloa- 
ing to  one  another  in  books,  and  across  all 
things,  as  we  feel  and  read,  is  the  call  of  our 
possible  selves.  Kven  the  impossible  has  been 
achieved,  books  tell  us,  in  history,  again  and 
again.  It  has  been  achieved  by  several  men. 
This  may  not  prove  very  much,  but  if  it  does 
not  prove  anything  else,  it  proves  that  the 
possible,  at  least,  is  the  privilege  of  the  rest 
of  us.  It  has  its  greeting  for  every  man.  The 
sense  of  the  possible  crowds  around  him,  and 
not  merely  in  his  books  nor  merely  in  his  life, 
but  in  the  place  where  his  life  and  books  meet 
— in  his  soul.  However  or  wherever  a  man 
may  be  placed,  it  is  the  great  book  that  re- 
minds him  Who  he  is.  It  reminds  him  who 
his  Neighbour  is.  It  is  his  charter  of  possibil- 
ity. Having  seen,  he  acts  on  what  he  sees, 
and  reads  himself  out  and  reads  himself  in 
accordingly. 


Ube  Great  (3ame 


149 


Z\)C  (5reat  (Same 


Ube  (3reat 
(Same 


It  would  be  hard  to  say  which  is  the  more 
important,  reading  for  exports  or  imports, 
reading  one's  self  out  or  reading  one's  self  in, 
but  inasmuch  as  the  importance  of  reading  one's 
self  out  is  more  generally  overlooked,  it  may 
be  well  to  dwell  upon  it.  Most  of  the  reading 
theories  of  the  best  people  to-day,  judging 
from  the  prohibitions  of  certain  books,  overlook 
the  importance  altogether,  in  vital  and  normal 
persons  —  especially  the  young, —  of  reading 
one's  self  out.  It  is  only  as  some  people  keep 
themselves  read  out,  and  read  out  regularly, 
that  they  can  be  kept  from  bringing  evil  on  the 
rest  of  us.  If  Eve  had  had  a  novel,  she  would 
have  sat  down  under  the  Tree  and  read  about 
the  fruit  instead  of  eating  it.  If  Adam  had 
had  a  morning  paper,  he  would  hardly  have 
listened  to  his  wife's  suggestion.  If  the  Evil 
One  had  come  up  to  Eve  in  the  middle  of  Les 
Miserables,  or  one  of  Rossetti's  sonnets,  no  one 
would  ever  have  heard  of  him.  The  main  mis- 
fortune of  Adam  and  Eve  was  that  they  had 
no  arts  to  come  to  the  rescue  of  their  religion. 
If  Eve  could  have  painted  the  apple,  she  would 
not  have  eaten  it.  She  put  it  into  her  mouth 
because  she  could  not  think  of  anything  else 
to  do  with  it,  and  she  had  to  do  something. 
She  had  the  artistic  temperament  (inherited 


ISO 


Ubc  Cbtlt)  an&  Ubc  »ooft 


Ubc  ©reat 
Game 


from  her  mother  Sleep,  probably,  or  from  being 
born  in  a  dream),  and  the  temptation  of  the 
artistic  temperament  is,  that  it  gets  itself  ex- 
pressed or  breaks  something.  She  had  tried 
everything  —  flowers,  birds,  clouds,  and  her 
shadow  in  the  stream,  but  she  found  they  were 
all  inexpressible.  She  could  not  express  them. 
She  could  not  even  express  herself.  Taking 
walks  in  Paradise  and  talking  with  the  one 
man  the  place  afforded  was  not  a  complete  and 
satisfying  self-expression.  Adam  had  his  limi- 
tations— like  all  men.  There  were  things  that 
could  not  be  said. 

Standing  as  we  do  on  the  present  height  of 
history,  with  all  the  resources  of  sympathy  in 
the  modern  world,  its  countless  arts  drawing 
the  sexes  together,  going  about  understanding 
people,  communing  with  them,  and  express- 
ing them,  making  a  community  for  every  man, 
even  in  his  solitude,  it  is  not  hard  to  see  that 
the  comparative  failure  of  the  first  marriage 
was  a  matter  of  course.  The  real  trouble  was 
that  Adam  and  Eve,  standing  in  their  brand- 
new  world,  could  not  express  themselves  to 
one  another.  As  there  was  nothing  else  to 
express  them,  they  were  bored.  It  is  to  Eve's 
credit  that  she  was  more  bored  than  Adam 
was,  and  that  she  resented  it  more;  and  while 
a  Fall,  under  the  circumstances,  was  as  painful 
as  it  was  inevitable,  and  a  rather  extreme 
measure  on  Eve's  part,  no  one  will  deny  that 
it  afforded  relief  on  the  main  point.     It  seems 


Ubc  Great  (Bame 


151 


to  be  the  universal  instinct  of  all  Eve's  sons 
and  daughters  that  have  followed  since,  that  an 
expressive  world  is  better  than  a  dull  one. 
An  expressive  world  is  a  world  in  which  all 
the  men  and  women  are  getting  themselves 
expressed,  either  in  their  experiences  or  in 
their  arts — that  is,  in  other  people's  experi- 
ences. 

The  play,  the  picture,  and  the  poem  and  the 
novel  and  the  symphony  have  all  been  the  out- 
growth of  Eve's  infinity.  She  could  not  con- 
tain herself.  She  either  had  more  experience 
than  she  could  express,  or  she  had  more  to 
express  than  she  could  possibly  put  into  ex- 
perience. 

One  of  the  worst  things  that  we  know  about 
the  Japanese  is  that  they  have  no  imperative 
mood  in  the  language.  To  be  able  to  say  of  a 
nation  that  it  has  been  able  to  live  for  thou- 
sands of  years  without  feeling  the  need  of  an 
imperative,  is  one  of  the  most  terrible  and 
sweeping  accusations  that  has  ever  been  made 
against  a  people  on  the  earth.  Swearing  may 
not  be  respectable,  but  it  is  a  great  deal  more 
respectable  than  never  wanting  to.  Either  a 
man  is  dead  in  this  world,  or  he  is  out  looking 
for  words  on  it.  There  is  a  great  place  left 
over  in  him,  and  as  long  as  that  place  is  left 
over,  it  is  one  of  the  practical  purposes  of 
books  to  make  it  of  some  use  to  him.  Whether 
the  place  is  a  good  one  or  a  bad  one,  something 
must  be  done  with  it,  and  books  must  do  it. 


Ubc  Oreat 
Oame 


152 


tTbe  Cbilt)  ant)  Zbc  Booft 


Ube  Oreat 
(Bame 


If  there  were  wordlessness  for  five  hundred 
years,  man  would  seek  vast  inarticulate  words 
for  himself.  Cathedrals  would  rise  from  the 
ground  undreamed  as  yet  to  say  we  worshipped. 
Music  would  be  the  daily  necessity  of  the 
humblest  life.  Orchestras  all  around  the  world 
would  be  created,  —  would  float  language 
around  the  dumbness  in  it.  Composers  would 
become  the  greatest,  the  most  practical  men 
in  all  the  nations.  Viaducts  would  stretch 
their  mountains  of  stone  across  the  valleys  to 
find  a  word  that  said  we  were  strong.  Out  of 
the  stones  of  the  hills,  the  mists  of  rivers,  out 
of  electricity,  even  out  of  silence  itself,  we 
would  force  expression.  From  the  time  a  baby 
first  moves  his  limbs  to  when — an  old  man — he 
struggles  for  his  last  breath,  the  one  imperious 
divine  necessity  of  life  is  expression.  Hence 
the  artist  now  and  for  ever — the  ruler  of  his- 
tory— whoever  makes  it.  And  if  he  cannot 
make  it,  he  makes  the  makers  of  it.  The 
artist  is  the  man  who,  failing  to  find  neigh- 
bours for  himself,  makes  his  neighbours  with 
his  own  hands.  If  a  woman  is  childless,  she 
paints  Madonnas.  It  is  the  inspiration,  the 
despair  that  rests  over  all  life.  If  we  cannot 
express  ourselves  in  things  that  are  made,  we 
make  things,  and  if  we  cannot  express  our- 
selves in  the  things  we  make,  we  turn  to 
words,  and  if  we  cannot  express  ourselves  in 
words,  we  turn  to  other  men's  words. 

The  man  who  is  satisfied  with  one  life  does 


Ube  Great  (3ame 


153 


not  exist.  The  suicide  does  not  commit  suicide 
because  he  is  tired  of  life,  but  because  he  wants 
so  many  more  lives  that  he  cannot  have.  The 
native  of  the  tropics  buys  a  book  to  the  North 
Pole.  If  we  are  poor,  we  grow  rich  on  paper. 
We  roll  in  carriages  through  the  highway  of 
letters.  If  we  are  rich,  we  revel  in  a  printed 
poverty.  We  cry  our  hearts  out  over  our 
starving  paper-children  and  hold  our  shivering, 
aching  magazine  hands  over  dying  coals  in 
garrets  we  live  in  by  subscription  at  three  dol- 
lars a  year.  The  Bible  is  the  book  that  has 
influenced  men  most  in  the  world  because  it 
has  expressed  them  the  most.  The  moment 
it  ceases  to  be  the  most  expressive  book,  it  will 
cease  to  be  the  most  practical  and  effective  one 
in  human  life.  There  is  more  of  us  than  we 
can  live.  The  touch  of  the  infinite  through 
which  our  spirits  wandered  is  still  upon  us. 
The  world  cries  to  the  poet :  '  *  Give  me  a  new 
word — a  word — a  word !  I  will  have  a  word ! ' ' 
It  cries  to  the  great  man  out  of  all  its  narrow 
places:  "  Give  me  another  life!  I  will  have  a 
new  life ! ' '  and  every  hero  the  world  has 
known  is  worn  threadbare  with  worship,  be- 
cause his  life  says  for  other  men  what  their 
lives  have  tried  to  say.  Every  masterful  life 
calls  across  the  world  a  cry  of  liberty  to  pent- 
up  dreams,  to  the  ache  of  faith  in  all  of  us, 
*  *  Here  thou  art  my  brother — this  is  thy  heart 
that  I  have  lived."  A  hero  is  immortalised 
because  his  life  is  every  man's  larger  self.     So 


Ubc  ©reat 
(Same 


154 


XTbe  Cbil^  anb  Ube  Booft 


Ube  ©reat 
Oame 


through  the  day-span  of  our  years — a  tale  that 
is  never  told — ^we  wander  on,  the  infinite  heart 
of  each  of  us  prisoned  in  blood  and  flesh  and 
the  cry  of  us  everywhere,  throughout  all  be- 
ing, "  Give  me  room!  "  It  cries  to  the  com- 
poser, **  Make  a  high  wide  place  for  me!  "  and 
on  the  edge  of  the  silence  between  life  and 
words,  to  music  we  come  at  last  because  it  is 
the  supreme  confidante  of  the  human  heart, 
the  confessional,  the  world-priest  between  the 
actual  self  and  the  larger  self  of  all  of  us.  With 
all  the  multiplying  of  arts  and  the  piling  up  of 
books  that  have  come  to  us,  the  most  important 
experience  that  men  have  had  in  this  world 
since  they  began  on  it,  is  that  they  are  infinite, 
that  they  cannot  be  expressed  on  it.  It  is  not 
infrequently  said  that  men  must  get  themselves 
expressed  in  living,  but  the  fact  remains  that 
no  one  has  ever  heard  of  a  man  as  yet  who 
really  did  it,  or  who  was  small  enough  to  do  it. 
There  was  One  who  seemed  to  express  Himself 
by  living  and  by  dying  both,  but  if  He  had  any 
more  than  succeeded  in  beginning  to  express 
Himself,  no  one  would  have  believed  that  He 
was  the  Son  of  God,— even  that  He  was  the 
Son  of  Man.  It  was  because  He  could  not 
crowd  all  that  He  was  into  thirty-three  short 
years  and  twelve  disciples  and  one  Garden  of 
Gethsemane  and  one  Cross  that  we  know  who 
He  was. 

Riveted  down  to  its  little  place  with  iron  cir- 
cumstance, the  actual  self  in  every  man  de- 


©utwarD  JBounD 


155 


pends  upon  the  larger  possible  self  for  the 
something  that  makes  the  actual  self  worth 
while.  It  is  hard  to  be  held  down  by  circum- 
stance, but  it  would  be  harder  to  be  contented 
there,  to  live  without  those  intimations  of  our 
diviner  birth  that  come  to  us  in  books — books 
that  weave  some  of  the  glory  we  have  missed 
in  our  actual  lives,  into  the  glory  of  our 
thoughts.  Even  if  life  be  to  the  uttermost  the 
doing  of  what  are  called  practical  things,  it  is 
only  by  the  occasional  use  of  his  imagination  in 
reading  or  otherwise,  that  the  practical  man 
can  hope  to  be  in  physical  or  mental  condition 
to  do  them.  He  needs  a  rest  from  his  actual 
self.  A  man  cannot  even  be  practical  without 
this  imaginary  or  larger  self.  Unless  he  can 
work  off  his  unexpressed  remnant,  his  limbs 
are  not  free.  Even  down  to  the  meanest  of 
us,  we  are  incurably  larger  than  anything  we 
can  do. 

Reading  a  book  is  a  game  a  man  plays  with 
his  own  infinity. 


Outwarb 
ISounb 


VI 


©utvoarb  ffiounb 


If  there  could  only  be  arranged  some  mystical 
place  over  the  edge  of  human  existence,  where 
we  all  could  go  and  practise  at  living,  have 
full-dress  rehearsals  of  our  parts,  before  we  are 
hustled  in  front  of  the  footlights  in  our  very 


156 


Ube  CbilD  anb  Ubc  Booft 


©utwart 
Sound 


swaddling  clothes,  how  many  people  are  there 
who  have  reached  what  are  fabulously  called 
years  of  discretion,  who  would  not  believe  in 
such  a  place,  and  who  would  not  gladly  go 
back  to  it  and  spend  most  of  the  rest  of  their 
lives  there  ? 

This  is  one  of  the  things  that  the  world  of 
books  is  for.  Most  of  us  would  hardly  know 
what  to  do  without  it,  the  world  of  books,  if 
only  as  a  place  to  make  mistakes  and  to  feel 
foolish  in.  It  seems  to  be  the  one  great  un- 
observed retreat,  where  all  the  sons  of  men 
may  go,  may  be  seen  flocking  day  and  night, 
to  get  the  experiences  they  would  not  have, 
to  be  ready  for  those  they  cannot  help  hav- 
ing. It  is  the  Rehearsal  Room  of  History. 
The  gods  watch  it — this  Place  of  Books — as  we 
who  live  go  silent,  trooping  back  and  forth  in 
it  —  the  ceaseless,  heartless,  awful,  beautiful 
pantomime  of  life. 

It  seems  to  be  the  testimony  of  human  na- 
ture, after  a  somewhat  immemorial  experience, 
that  some  things  in  us  had  better  be  expressed 
by  being  lived,  and  that  other  things  had  better 
be  expressed — if  possible — in  some  other  way. 

There  are  a  great  many  men,  even  amongst 
the  wisest  and  strongest  of  us,  who  benefit  every 
year  of  their  lives  by  what  might  be  called  the 
purgative  function  of  literature, — men  who,  if 
they  did  not  have  a  chance  at  the  right  mo- 
ment to  commit  certain  sins  with  their  imagin- 
ary selves,  would  commit  them  with  their  real 


©utwarb  Bo\xnt> 


157 


ones.  Many  a  man  of  the  larger  and  more 
comprehensive  type,  hungering  for  the  heart 
of  all  experience,  bound  to  have  its  spirit,  if 
not  itself,  has  run  the  whole  gamut  of  his  pos- 
sible selves  in  books,  until  all  the  sins  and  all 
the  songs  of  men  have  coursed  through  his 
being.  He  finds  himself  reading  not  only  to 
fill  his  lungs  with  ozone  and  his  heart  with 
the  strength  of  the  gods,  but  to  work  ofi"  the 
humour  in  his  blood,  to  express  his  underself, 
and  get  it  out  of  the  way.  Women  who  never 
cry  their  tears  out — it  is  said — are  desperate, 
and  men  who  never  read  their  sins  away  are 
dangerous.  People  who  are  tired  of  doing 
wrong  on  paper  do  right.  To  be  sick  of  one's 
sins  in  a  book  saves  not  only  one's  self  but 
every  one  else  a  deal  of  trouble.  A  man  has 
not  learned  how  to  read  until  he  reads  with 
his  veins  as  well  as  his  arteries. 

It  would  be  useless  to  try  to  make  out  that 
evil  passions  in  literature  accomplish  any  ab- 
solute good,  but  they  accomplish  a  relative 
good  which  the  world  can  by  no  means  afford 
to  overlook.  The  amount  of  crime  that  is  sug- 
gested by  reading  can  be  more  than  offset  by 
the  extraordinary  amount  of  crime  waiting  in 
the  hearts  of  men,  aimed  at  the  world  and 
glanced  off  on  paper. 

There  are  many  indications  that  this  purga- 
tive function  of  literature  is  the  main  thing  it 
is  for  in  our  present  modern  life.  Modern  life 
is  so  constituted  that  the  majority  of  people 


®utwar6 
£ound 


158 


Ube  Cbild  and  Ube  IBooft 


©utwar& 
JBounb 


who  live  in  it  are  expressing  their  real  selves 
more  truly  in  their  reading  than  they  are  in 
their  lives.  When  one  stops  to  consider  what 
these  lives  are — most  of  them  — there  can  be 
but  one  conclusion  about  the  reading  of  the 
people  who  have  to  live  them,  and  that  is  that 
while  sensational  reading  may  be  an  evil,  as 
compared  with  the  evil  that  has  made  it  neces- 
sary, it  is  an  immeasurable  blessing. 

The  most  important  literary  and  artistic  fact 
of  the  nineteenth  century  is  the  subdivision  of 
labour — that  is,  the  subdividing  of  every  man's 
life  and  telling  him  he  must  only  be  alive  in  a 
part  of  it.  In  proportion  as  an  age  takes  sen- 
sations out  of  men's  lives  it  is  obliged  to  put 
them  into  their  literature.  Men  are  used  to 
sensations  on  the  earth  as  long  as  they  stay  on 
it  and  they  are  bound  to  have  them  in  one  way 
or  another.  An  age  which  narrows  the  actual 
lives  of  men,  which  so  adjusts  the  labour  of  the 
world  that  nearly  every  man  in  it  not  only 
works  with  a  machine,  spiritual  or  otherwise, 
but  is  a  machine  himself,  and  a  small  part  of  a 
machine,  must  not  find  fault  with  its  art  for 
being  full  of  hysterics  and  excitement,  or  with 
its  newspapers  for  being  sensational.  Instead 
of  finding  fault  it  has  every  reason  to  be  grate- 
ful— to  thank  a  most  merciful  Heaven  that  the 
men  in  the  world  are  still  alive  enough  in  it  to 
be  capable  of  feeling  sensation  in  other  men's 
lives,  though  they  have  ceased  to  be  capable 
of  having  sensations  in  their  own,  or  of  feeling 


©utwart)  JSounO 


159 


sensations  if  they  had  them.  It  was  when  the 
herds  of  her  people  were  buried  in  routine  and 
peace  that  Rome  had  bull- fights.  New  York, 
with  its  hordes  of  drudges,  ledger-slaves,  ma- 
chinists, and  clerks,  has  the  New  York  World. 
It  lasts  longer  than  a  bull-fight  and  it  can  be 
had  every  morning  before  a  man  starts  ojBf  to 
be  a  machine  and  every  evening  when  he  gets 
back  from  being  a  machine — for  one  cent.  On 
Sunday  a  whole  Colosseum  fronts  him  and  he  is 
glutted  with  gore  from  morning  until  night. 
To  a  man  who  is  a  penholder  by  the  week,  or 
a  linotype  machine,  or  a  ratchet  in  a  factory,  a 
fight  is  infinite  peace.  Obedience  to  the  com- 
mand of  Scripture,  making  the  Sabbath  a  day 
of  rest,  is  entirely  relative.  Some  of  us  are 
rested  by  taking  our  under-interested  lives  to 
a  Sunday  paper,  and  others  are  rested  by  tak- 
ing our  over-interested  lives  to  church.  Men 
read  dime  novels  in  proportion  as  their  lives 
are  staid  and  mechanical.  Men  whose  lives 
are  their  own  dime  novels  are  bored  by  printed 
ones.  Men  whose  years  are  crowded  with 
crises,  culminations,  and  events,  who  run  the 
most  risks  in  business,  are  found  with  the 
steadiest  papers  in  their  hands.  The  train-boy 
knows  that  the  people  who  buy  the  biggest 
headlines  are  all  on  salaries  and  that  danger 
and  blood  and  thunder  are  being  read  nowa- 
days by  effeminately  safe  men,  because  it  is  the 
only  way  they  can  be  had. 

But  it  is  not  only  the  things  that  are  left  out 


®utwar6 
£oun& 


i6o 


Ube  (LbiU>  an&  Zbc  IBooft 


3Bounb 


of  men's  lives  but  the  things  they  have  too 
much  of,  which  find  their  remedy  in  books. 
They  are  the  levers  with  which  the  morbid  is 
controlled.  Similia  similibus  curantur  may  be 
a  dangerous  principle  to  be  applied  by  every- 
body, but  thousands  of  men  and  women  mulling 
away  on  their  lives  and  worrying  themselves 
with  themselves,  cutting  a  wide  swath  of  misery 
wherever  they  go,  have  suddenly  stopped  in  a 
book — have  purged  away  jealousy  and  despair 
and  passion  and  nervous  prostration  in  it.  A 
paper-person  with  melancholia  is  a  better  cure 
for  gloom  than  a  live  clown  can  be  —  who 
merely  goes  about  reminding  people  how  sad 
they  are. 

A  man  is  often  heard  to  say  that  he  has 
tragedy  enough  in  his  own  life  not  to  want  to 
go  to  a  play  for  more,  but  this  much  having 
been  said  and  truly  said,  he  almost  always  goes 
to  the  play — to  see  how  true  it  is.  The  stage 
is  his  huge  confidante.  Pitying  one's  self  is 
a  luxury,  but  it  takes  a  great  while,  and  one 
can  never  do  it  enough.  Being  pitied  by  a 
five-thousand-dollar  house,  and  with  incidental 
music,  all  for  a  dollar  and  a  half,  is  a  sure  and 
quick  way  to  cheer  up.  Being  pitied  by  Victor 
Hugo  is  a  sure  way  also.  Hardy  can  do  peo- 
ple's pitying  for  them  much  better  than  they 
can  do  it,  and  it 's  soon  over  and  done  with. 
It  is  noticeable  that  while  the  impressive  books, 
the  books  that  are  written  to  impress  people, 
have  a  fair  and  nominal  patronage,  it  is  the 


©utwart)  Bounb 


i6i 


expressive  books,  the  books  that  let  people 
out,  which  have  the  enormous  sales.  This 
seems  to  be  true  of  the  big-sale  books  whether 
the  people  expressed  in  them  are  worth  ex- 
pressing (to  any  one  but  themselves)  or  not. 
The  principle  of  getting  one's  self  expressed  is 
so  largely  in  evidence  that  not  only  the  best  but 
the  worst  of  our  books  illustrate  it.  Our  popu- 
lar books  are  carbuncles  mostly.  They  are  the 
inevitable  and  irrepressible  form  of  the  instinct 
of  health  in  us,  struggling  with  disease.  On 
the  whole,  it  makes  being  an  optimist  in 
modern  life  a  little  less  of  a  tight-rope-walk. 
If  even  the  bad  elements  in  current  literature 
— which  are  discouraging  enough — are  making 
us  better,  what  shall  be  said  of  the  good  ? 


Outward 
Sound 


Shelburne  Essays 

By  Paul  Elmer  More 

4  vofs.     Crown  octavo, 
t  Sold  separately.     Net,  $1.25.     (By  mail,  $1.35) 

Contents 

First  Series  :  A  Hermit's  Notes  on  Thoreau— The  Soli- 
tude of  Nathaniel  Hawthorne — The  Origins  of  Haw* 
thorne  and  Poe — The  Influence  of  Emerson — The  Spirit 
of  Carlyle  —  The  Science  of  English  Verse  —  Arthur 
Symonds :  The  Two  Illusions — The  Epic  of  Ireland- 
Two  Poets  of  the  Irish  Movement — Tolstoy;  or,  The 
Ancient  Feud  between  Philosophy  and  Art — The  Re- 
ligious Ground  of  Humanitarianism. 

Second  Series  :  Elizabethan  Sonnets — Shakespeare's  Son* 
nets — Lafcadio  Heam — The  First  Complete  Edition  of 
Hazlitt  —  Charles  Lamb  —  Kipling  and  FitzGerald  — • 
George  Crabbe  —  The  Novels  of  George  Meredith— 
Hawthorne :  Looking  before  and  after  —  Delphi  and 
Greek  Literature — Nemesis ;  or,  The  Divine  Envy, 

Third  Series  :  The  Correspondence  of  William  Cowper— 
Whittier  the  Poet — The  Centenary  of  Sainte-Beuve^^ 
The  Scotch  Novels  and  Scotch  History — Swinburne- 
Christina  Rossetti — Why  is  Browning  Popular  ? — A  Note 
on  Byron's  **Don  Juan" — Laurence  Sterne — J.  Henxy 
Shorthouse— The  Quest. 

Fourth  Series  :  The  Vicar  of  Morwenstow—Fanny  Bar- 
ney—A  Note  on  "  Daddy"  Crisp— George  Herbert— John 
Keats — Benjamin  Franklin — Charles  Lamb  Again — ^Walt 
Whitman— William  Blake— The  Letters  of  Horace  Wale 
pole — The  Theme  of  Paradise  Lost. 


A  Few  Press  Criticisms  on 
Shelburne  Essays 

**  It  is  a  pleasure  to  hail  in  Mr.  More  a  genuine  critic,  for 
genuine  critics  in  America  in  these  days  are  uncommonly 
scarce.  .  .  .  We  recommend,  as  a  sample  of  his  breadth, 
style,  acumen,  and  power  the  essay  on  Tolstoy  in  the  present 
volume.  That  represents  criticism  that  has  not  merely 
a  metropolitan  but  a  world  note.  .  .  .  One  is  thoroughly 
grateful  to  Mr.  More  for  the  high  quality  of  his  thought,  his 
serious  purpose,  and  his  excellent  style." — Harvard  Gradu- 
ates^ Magazine. 

'*We  do  not  know  of  any  one  now  writing  who  gives 
evidence  of  a  better  critical  equipment  than  Mr.  More.  It 
is  rare  nowadays  to  find  a  writer  so  thoroughly  familiar  with 
both  ancient  and  modern  thought.  It  is  this  width  of  view, 
this  intimate  acquaintance  with  so  much  of  the  best  that  has 
been  thought  and  said  in  the  world,  irrespective  of  local 
prejudice,  that  constitute  Mr.  More's  strength  as  a  critic. 
He  has  been  able  to  form  for  himself  a  sound  literary  canon 
and  a  sane  philosophy  of  life  which  constitute  to  our  mind 
his  peculiar  merit  as  a  critic." — Independent. 

'*  He  is  familiar  with  classical,  Oriental,  and  English 
literature;  he  uses  a  temperate,  lucid,  weighty,  and  not 
ungraceful  style  ;  he  is  aware  of  his  best  predecessors,  and  is 
apparently  on  the  way  to  a  set  of  philosophic  principles 
which  should  lead  him  to  a  high  and  perhaps  influential 
place  in  criticism.  .  .  .  We  believe  that  we  are  in  the 
presence  of  a  critic  who  must  be  counted  among  the  first  who 
take  literature  and  life  for  their  theme." — London  Speaker, 


G.   P.    Putnam's  Sons 
New  York  London 


By 
ARTHUR  C.  BENSON  ("T.  B.") 
(Eighth  Impression) 

From  a  College  Window 

A  collection  of  essays  in  which  the  reader 
is  brought  under  the  spell  of  a  singularly- 
interesting  and  attractive  personality.  The 
book  is  a  frank  outpouring  of  the  author's 
intimate  thoughts,  a  frank  expression  of 
what  he  prizes  in  life  and  what  he  expects 
from  life.  Mr.  Benson's  papers  are  character- 
ized by  the  intimacy  of  self-revelation  and 
allusiveness  and  sense  of  overflow  that 
belong  to  the  familiar  essay  at  its  best 

*'  Mr.  Benson  has  written  nothing  equal  to  this  mellow  and 
full-flavored  book.  From  cover  to  cover  it  is  packed  with  per- 
sonality; from  phrase  to  phrase  it  reveals  a  thoroughly  sincere 
and  unaffected  effort  of  self-expression;  full-orbed  and  four- 
square, it  is  a  piece  of  true  and  simple  literature." 

London  Chronicle. 

(Eighth  Impression) 

The  Upton  Letters 

•'A  piece  of  real  literature  of  the  highest  order,  beautiful  and 
fragrant.  To  review  the  book  adequately  is  impossible.  .  .  . 
It  is  in  truth  a  precious  thing," — Week's  Survey. 

"A  book  that  we  have  read  and  reread  if  only  for  the  sake  of 
its  delicious  flavor.  There  has  been  nothing  so  good  of  its 
kind  since  the  Etchingham  Letters.  The  letters  are  beautiful, 
quiet,  and  wise,  dealing  with  deep  things  in  a  dignified  way." 

Christian  Register, 
Crown  8vo.  Each,  $1.35  net. 

Q.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 

New  York  London 


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